Walter Pater

Born in London in 1839, Walter Pater was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He spent most of his life in Oxford, where he became a fellow of Brasenose College and built a reputation as a brilliant, highly original critic and teacher.

Pater is best remembered for Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a book that helped shape the Aesthetic movement in Britain. His essays urged readers to pay close attention to the intensity of experience and to the power of art, and his polished, musical prose made him one of the great stylists of the 19th century. He also wrote fiction, including Marius the Epicurean, along with later collections such as Imaginary Portraits and Appreciations.

Although his life was outwardly quiet, his influence was far-reaching. His ideas about beauty, sensation, and artistic freedom left a mark on writers and artists of his own time and after, including figures associated with aestheticism and literary modernity. He died in Oxford in 1894.