Walter Pater

Walter Pater, English critic, essayist, and humanist whose advocacy of "art for art's sake" became a cardinal doctrine of the movement known as Aestheticism, was born in Shadwell, London on 4 August 1839. He died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire.

Educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Queen's College, Oxford, where he studied Greek philosophy under Benjamin Jowett. Settled in Oxford and read with private pupils. In 1864 was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose College. He intended to enter the church but developed an interest in classical studies.

Wrote reviews, and essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo which became a collection in 1873 called Studies in the History of the Renaissance. (The Renaissance)

'His delicate, fastidious style and sensitive appreciation of Renaissance art in these essays made his reputation as a scholar and an aesthete, and he became the centre of a small group of admirers in Oxford. In the concluding essay in The Renaissance, Pater asserted that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it acknowledges neither moral standards nor utilitarian functions in its reason for being. These views brought Pater into an association with Swinburne and with the Pre-Raphaelites.' (Britannica)

He wrote several works: Marius the Epicurean(1885) , Imaginary Portraits (1887),Appreciations (1889) Plato and Platonism (1893), Greek Studies (1895), Miscellaneous Studies(1895), Essays from The Guardian (privately printed, 1896. Published posthumously was his unfinished romance, Gaston de Latour(1896).

'Pater's early influence was confined to a small circle in Oxford, but he came to have a widespread effect on the next literary generation. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his followers and show obvious and continual traces both of his style and of his ideas.' (Britannica)