Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists.
22 Facts About Walter Pater
2.
Dr Pater died while Walter was an infant and the family moved to Enfield.
3.
Walter Pater was fourteen when his mother, Maria Pater, died in 1854.
4.
Walter Pater gained a school exhibition, with which he proceeded in 1858 to Queen's College, Oxford.
5.
In Jowett's classes Walter Pater was a disappointment; he took a Second in Literae Humaniores in 1862.
6.
Walter Pater became acutely interested in art and literature, and started to write articles and criticism.
7.
The Leonardo essay contains Walter Pater's celebrated reverie on the Mona Lisa ; the Botticelli essay was the first in English on this painter, contributing to the revival of interest in him; while the Winckelmann essay explored a temperament with whom Walter Pater felt a strong affinity.
8.
In 1874 Walter Pater was turned down at the last moment by his erstwhile mentor Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, for a previously-promised proctorship.
9.
Many of Walter Pater's works focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either in a Platonic way or, obliquely, in a more physical way.
10.
The satire appeared during the competition for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and played a role in convincing Walter Pater to remove himself from consideration.
11.
Walter Pater was an early friend and supporter of the young pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon.
12.
The novel's opening and closing episodes betray Walter Pater's continuing nostalgia for the atmosphere, ritual and community of the religious faith he had lost.
13.
In 1885, on the resignation of John Ruskin, Walter Pater became a candidate for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford University, but though in many ways the strongest of the field, he withdrew from the competition, discouraged by continuing hostility in official quarters.
14.
In 1889 Walter Pater published Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, a collection of previously-printed essays on literature.
15.
When he reworked his 1876 essay 'Romanticism' as the 'Postscript' to Appreciations, Walter Pater removed its references to Baudelaire, substituting Hugo's name in their place.
16.
Harold Bloom noted that "Walter Pater praises Plato for Classic correctness, for a conservative centripetal impulse, against his [Walter Pater's] own Heraclitean Romanticism," but "we do not believe him when he presents himself as a centripetal man".
17.
On 30 July 1894, Walter Pater died suddenly in his Oxford home of heart failure brought on by rheumatic fever, at the age of 54.
18.
Walter Pater had conceived Marius as the first novel of "a trilogy of works of similar character dealing with the same problems, under altered historical conditions"; Gaston was to have been the second, while the third was to have been set in England in the late 18th century.
19.
In 1995 Gerald Monsman published Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text, re-editing the seven chapters and editing the remaining six which Shadwell and Clara Walter Pater had withheld as too unfinished.
20.
Toward the end of his life Walter Pater's writings were exercising a considerable influence.
21.
Walter Pater was much admired for his prose style, which he strove to make worthy of his aesthetic ideals, taking great pains and fastidiously correcting his work.
22.
Walter Pater kept on his desk little squares of paper, each with its ideas, and shuffled them about attempting to form a sequence and pattern.