Walter Horatio Pater was born on August 4, 1839, and was the second son of Dr. Richard Pater. After his father's untimely death, Walter's family moved to Enfield, where Walter attended the Enfield Grammar School until 1853 when he left to attend the King's School in Canterbury.
While there, Walter read John Ruskin's Modern Painters, which inspired a love of art and prose. He eventually gained a school exhibition, which he took to the Queen's College in 1858.
In 1866, he anonymously published his first critical essay on the metaphysics of Coleridge in the Westminster Review. He then published an essay on Winckelmann in 1867, followed by the Poems of William Morris in 1868.
In the following years, the Fortnightly Review printed essays on Leonardo da Vinci (1869), Sandro Botticelli (1870), and Michelangelo (1871).
These publications eventually became Walter's first collected works, known as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, which he published in 1873.
Walter Pater died of heart failure caused by rheumatic fever on July 30, 1894. He is now buried at the Holywell Cemetery in Oxford, and his home at 12 Earl's Terrace, Kensington, is now part of the English Heritage.
