Pater, Walter (Horatio) - Anne Marie Candido (essay date 1993)
Anne Marie Candido (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: “Biography and the Objective Fallacy: Pater's Experiment in ‘A Prince of Court Painters,’” in Biography, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 147-60.
[In the following essay, Candido describes Pater's portrait of Jean-Antoine Watteau as radically incorporating multiple layers of perspective. Candido also discusses Pater's inclusion of himself as “editor” in order to demonstrate the impossibility of objective biography.]
An enlightening though largely unacknowledged essay by Charles Whibley, “The Limits of Biography,” appeared in England in 1897 in a periodical entitled The Nineteenth Century.1 The essay reflects new biographical standards which marked a trend in the later part of the century toward an even more inward vision of the biographical subject than either Carlyle or the American Transcendentalists had provided, a vision not essentially moral or...
[The entire page is 5940 words long]
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