Walter Pater

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism.

4 August 1839

Born on the same birth day (4 August): Doudou Ndoye • Frances Stewart (economist) • Hiroyuki Usui • James Arbuthnot • Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici • Mark Bickley

Born in the same month (August 1839): Aleksandr Stoletov • Antonín Petrof • Gulstan Ropert • Nelson A. Miles