Wealth & Money Quote by William Allan

There is a quiet act of rebellion tucked inside that polite opening: "Father". Allan doesn’t launch into a manifesto; he offers a verdict. The line turns on "in spite of", a phrase that treats his education not as a gift but as a sunk cost - and still not persuasive enough to buy his obedience. It’s a son acknowledging the family’s investment in respectability while refusing to let that investment determine his life.

The cultural pressure is legible in the detail. Latin wasn’t just a subject; it was a passport into the professional classes, a signal that the household aspired to gentility and stable status. Painting, by contrast, sat in an awkward middle ground in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain: potentially prestigious, but economically uncertain, socially suspect, and dependent on patronage, networks, and taste. Allan’s phrasing concedes the risk without apologizing for it.

What makes the sentence work is its plainness. No romance about "following my dream", no aesthetic theory. Just a stubborn future tense: "I will be". That insistence carries the subtext that identity isn’t granted by schooling or inheritance; it’s chosen, even if it means disappointing the people who paid for the safer version of you.

Read in context of an artist’s trajectory, it also hints at a common origin story: the would-be professional expected to become a clergyman, lawyer, or bureaucrat, deciding instead to wager everything on talent. Allan frames the choice as inevitability, not whim - the kind of resolve that makes a risky vocation sound like destiny.