amateur

amateur in sports, one who engages in athletic competition without material recompense. Upper-class Englishmen in the 19th cent. used the concept to help define their social status, first applying the term to sportsmen who did not need to work with their hands as livelihood, later using it to describe anyone who competed without pay. By the beginning of the 20th cent., leaders of two major sports movements, the American intercollegiate athletic system and the Olympic Games (revived in 1896), had adopted amateurism, claiming it developed competitors who were morally superior to professionals. In a famous incident, Olympic officials stripped decathlete Jim Thorpe of two gold medals won at the 1912 Games because he had once accepted money to play baseball. Although almost all athletic structures not organized as professional ventures came to embrace amateurism as policy, athletes often subverted the code, forcing officials to constantly revise standards. From the outset, colleges allowed payment of educational expenses to athletes. In 1974, after Communist bloc nations had been subsidizing their athletes for two decades, the Olympics ceded to athletes the right to compensation for loss of salary during training, and shortly thereafter permitted professionals in sports whose governing bodies did not object. By the 1960s top-ranked golf and tennis amateurs had forced major tournaments to allow professional entrants. As evidenced by the return of Thorpe's medals in 1982, amateurism by the 1990s was a concept of diminished importance and one more of technical than moral distinction. The major organizations involved in the supervision of amateur athletics in the United States are the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), responsible for college and university sports, and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), responsible for most other areas of amateur competition.

Bibliography: See J. Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (1980).

amateur XVIII. — F. — It. amatore — L. amātor (see next).

amateur. An artist who works for pleasure rather than for a livelihood. In Western art, the idea of amateur status began to have meaning only with the Renaissance, for before this time the visual arts were considered mere crafts and therefore were socially unacceptable (see liberal arts). By the 17th century Renaissance ideals had spread to England, where Sir Nathaniel Bacon and Prince Rupert were notable amateur artists of the time. With the popularization of watercolour in the 18th and 19th centuries, amateur painters proliferated all over Europe. At the same time, sketching and watercolour became accepted ‘accomplishments’ for young ladies; Queen Victoria (see Royal Collection) practised both painting and etching. Local drawing and painting societies increased steadily in numbers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and amateurs were well represented at exhibitions of associations such as the London Group. They even invaded the once jealously guarded exhibitions of the Royal Academy, and one of the most famous of all amateur artists, Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), author of Painting as a Pastime (1948), was appointed an Honorary Academician Extraordinary. The success of numerous naive painters, together with the dubious economic status of the many professional artists who are not in regular employment, has further tended to obscure any sharp distinction between professional and amateur.

The word ‘amateur’, transplanted from France, is first recorded in English in 1784, as a term for a person who had a taste for any subject, not necessarily as an executant (French sale catalogues of the 18th century were often of the collections of ‘un grand amateur’). In 1786 the word was used in the more specialized sense of a person who cultivates a pursuit purely as a pastime. Before the word came into use, the term ‘virtuoso’ (see virtu) was sometimes used in similar senses, as was the term ‘dilettante’ after the founding of the Society of Dilettanti in 1732. Both ‘amateur’ and ‘dilettante’ are now apt to suggest a lack of serious aim or study; the words are sometimes used more or less synonymously, although ‘dilettante’ stresses ‘enjoyment rather than effort, a frittering rather than a concentration of one's energies’ (Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms, 1968) and in addition implies a degree of social distinction.

In China, contrary to the position in the West, art has always been accorded a noble position, and the amateur has enjoyed a higher status than the professional. (The difference in status might be seen as analogous to the distinction between ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Players’ that applied in English cricket until 1963.) The Emperor Hui Tsung (1082–1135) was perhaps the most distinguished of all such amateurs.