Walter Pater

Walter Pater (1839-1894), English essayist and critic. Walter Horatio Pater was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford, where he spent most of his life. He concentrated on interpreting to his age the art and literature of the Renaissance, through historical novels, stories, and, mainly, essays. His attention to elaborate, exquisite phrasing reveals his preoccupation with perfecting prose style without neglecting depth of subject matter. Pater is remembered primarily as an innovator in aesthetics who celebrated the pleasurable effects of art on the viewer or reader. “Art for art's sake,” a phrase taken from his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), was Peter's credo and became a rallying cry for the aesthetic movement of the 1880s. His hedonist philosophy greatly influenced his younger contemporary, the Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde. Pater is best known for his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), a study of the “sensations and ideas” of a young 2nd-century Roman confronting Christianity. His other works include Appreciations: with an Essay on Style (1889), which includes discerning essays on the work of such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and others, helped to define Pater's position as an influential man of letters; and the autobiographical The Child in the House (1894), which contains sketches of Pater's early years.