Pater, Walter

Pater, Walter (Horatio)

(born Aug. 4, 1839, Shadwell, London, Eng.—died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire) English critic, essayist, and humanist. Elected a fellow at the University of Oxford in 1864, Pater made his reputation as a scholar and aesthete with essays collected in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Written in a delicate, fastidious style, the essays introduced his influential advocacy of “art for art's sake,” which contrasted with the prevailing emphasis on art's moral or educational values and became a cardinal doctrine of Aestheticism. Marius the Epicurean (1885), a philosophical romance on the ideal life, is his most substantial work.