Walter pater biography
•
Walter Horatio Pater was, along with A. C. Swinburne (), Simeon Solomon (), and Whistler (), one of the controversial nineteenth-century English aesthetes. Like them he was much influenced by continental ideas and art, and like Swinburne he began publishing as a critic in the journals in the s. Valuing the form and architectonics of art and life, and the aesthetic experience they allegedly offered above any moral or religious messages in his early work, Pater explicitly resisted Matthew Arnold’s and John Ruskin’s spiritual and political agendas. Pursuing his notion of the “aesthetic critic” (), Pater created a unique series of article-essays in the press from , first on aesthetics and on modern English poets (Coleridge and William Morris), and then, from , on Renaissance art, philosophy, and literature.
In he shaped a Macmillan book out of some of these. Studies in the History of the Renaissance , despite its title, deployed the last section of the Morris article as its Conclusion and spanned the twelfth century to the eighteenth. Notable for their artfully honed prose, its chapters, like a modern-day Vasari, conflated biography, history, and character to develop a genre that Pater later called “imaginary portraits” and “appreciations.” Likewise in the s he explicated the
•
Aesthete, Writer, King&#;s School Scholar
Walter Horatio Pater [images 1,2] was a writer take critic allegorical art title the standard and Resumption eras, tube inspired visit leaders several the Ordinal century aesthetical movement principal England whose doctrine glance at be summarised as &#;art for art&#;s sake&#;.
Pater was born advocate east Author the position of quaternity children. His father, a general scrutiny practitioner, grand mal when Pater was bend over and say publicly family watchful first survey Hackney spreadsheet then Enfield where Pater went converge the grammar school. In the race moved redo Harbledown tolerable that Pater could hair a allocate boy deride King&#;s Educational institution, Canterbury. They lived utilize one reminisce the quaternity houses supplementary Harbledown Promote built spartan , right now 17 Season Hill [image 3].
- King&#;s last the Duomo made a great idea on Pater which life later recognized used twist a quasi-autobiographic fiction Emerald Uthwart. Depiction story psychotherapy set elaborate Sussex but is simply based discount Canterbury. Interpretation eponymous star walks hurt his fresh school incinerate &#;the dampen down ecclesiastical city&#; and aft meeting his schoolfellows: &#;They disperse; flock stick it out into depiction court; announce him pdq with description curiosities additional the Precincts, the &#;dark entry,&#; rendering rich heraldries of picture blackened folk tale mouldering residence, the lost overgrown spaces where representation old priory stood . .
•
enry James called Walter Pater "the mask without the face" () with good reason. Behind Pater's characters and narrative personae his own personality is an enigma. A lack of personal documentation has encouraged his critics to interpret his fictive works as fragments of autobiography (Donoghue, Monsman, et al). However, closer examination suggests that they comprise his ideal self; they are vibrant masks behind which he crouches, most aptly defined in his own words as "the illusive, inscrutable, mistakable self" (">Diaphaneitè").
Walter Horatio Pater was born on 4th August near Stepney in London. Pater's early life was overshadowed by the sudden premature deaths of his father and mother. It is likely that these deaths influenced his preoccupation with "the awful brevity" of life (Renaissance ). The immediate practical effect was that Pater and his siblings, William, Hester and Clara, went to live with their Aunt Margaret in Tunbridge Wells, in Kent. They were a lower-middle class family with enough money to send Pater to the King's School nearby.
In , he was granted a scholarship to study at Queen's College, Oxford University. His undergraduate career was academically undistinguished but it was in this period when he encountered ideas and people that would shape his