Imaginary Portraits
Walter Pater
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Description
Walter Pater invented a form in Imaginary Portraits: four studies of artists and thinkers who never quite existed as he shows them. A Prince of Court Painters reconstructs the young Watteau from a friend's journal at Valenciennes in 1701, all sketches, feast days, and early genius. Denys l'Auxerrois brings a medieval god of wine into a French cathedral town, with bloody results.
Sebastian van Storck follows a Dutch follower of Spinoza into cold, abstract devotion, and Duke Carl of Rosenmold ends the book in eighteenth-century Germany. Pater writes slow, jeweled prose, caring more for a temperament's inner weather than for plot. The portraits are really essays on kinds of beauty and belief, and they shaped a generation of aesthetic writers.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Walter Pater |
|---|---|
| COLLECTION | BOOKS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 204 KB |
| LICENSE | PUBLIC_DOMAIN |
| RIGHTS | PUBLIC DOMAIN |
| SOURCE | Project Gutenberg |