Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive 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 first published in The Guardian. The collection of Pater's articles on ancient Greek thought, poetry, sculpture and architecture presented in this volume had previously been published in 1895 under the editorship of Pater's friend and literary executor C. L. Shadwell.
