Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and aesthetic experience. He brought his knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes of his major works with an additional volume of critical essays. Following the publication of his novel in 1885, Pater continued his experiments with thinking through fiction in these short portraits of historical figures, published as Imaginary Portraits (1887) and Gaston de Latour (1888–9). The theme of talented, beautiful young men who die young reflects Pater's aesthetic outlook.
