Walter Pater: Painting the Nineteenth Century

"Be strong but flexible.—Follow your convictions. Better to be nothing at all than to be overshadowed by paintings of the past. As the wise man says, he who follows is always one step behind…."

—Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Notebook entry, c. 1855¹

"With the battle between classicist, romanticist, fantaisiste, and realist, let us have nothing to do. Each of these schools represents instincts and tendencies for which is ample scope and justification.… Let each man follow his own instinct and his own tendency, provided they are really his."

—Sidney Colvin, "The Grosvenor Gallery," 1877²

Walter Pater's very Victorian love affair with the past was sustained, eclectic in its objects of desire, and enriching both personally and professionally. One imagines him, like Winckelmann, "handling" the art and literature of the past with purpose and passion: "finger[ing] those pagan marbles with unsinged hands"³ and reconsidering Renaissance canvases with an "enthusiasm" permeated "with an almost physical excitement." Again borrowing Pater's words for Winckelmann, "He is in touch with [the past]; it penetrates him, and becomes part of his temperament."⁴ Yet, as much as the past is a "living thing" for Pater, so too is the present. "Winckelmann" also insists that "the subtle and penetrative, yet somewhat grotesque art of the modern world," the complexity of "modern culture," must be interrogated with an equally "deeper view."⁵ In fact, the five concluding paragraphs of "Winckelmann" struggle, to use Pater's term for intellectual and aesthetic endeavour, to understand how the ancient world and its ideals can serve and delight "the modern world," can nurture its instincts "of self-culture"⁶ yet at the same time provide the "great experiences." The two temporalizing questions that frame the essay's conclusion—"Can we bring down that [Hellenic] ideal into the gaudy, perplexed light of modern life?" and "What does the spirit need in the face of modern life?"⁷ —are emphatic undercurrents throughout Pater's canon, channelled variously in philosophical, aesthetic, and fictional texts, but always in perpetual motion.

The prominent place of Victor Hugo at the end of both "Winckelmann" and the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance—as a "high example of modern art dealing thus with modern life"⁸ —might seem jarring or anachronistic at first glance, but readers soon learn that this is a typical gesture for Pater: making the experience of reading an act of bringing the past and the present into constant, however fractious, contact. All the while that he is studying Hellenic art, Platonic philosophy, or Renaissance culture, he is also developing a "network" of associations⁹ among nineteenth-century French writers such as Hugo, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and Prosper Mérimée, and English writers such as William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, John Henry Newman,¹⁰ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,¹¹ William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. "Modern" painters also strategically "penetrate the network," however subtly, and that is the subject of this article: how the very "modern mind" of Walter Pater experienced and assessed the works of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903).¹² The ongoing, intertextual¹³ presence of both in his writings not only reaffirms Pater's Bourdieu-like insight that artists "breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts,"¹⁴ but constitutes one of those definitional pairings which Pater deploys so effectively throughout his canon.¹⁵ References to their names and works (whether identified or not) help Pater to trace the aesthetic significance, "the vrai vérité about" romanticism, impressionism, and realism—those "most liberal and durable impressions which … lie beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly ascertained facts about" them.¹⁶

Both painters were considered iconoclasts by then-contemporary critics, who were sharply divided as to the painters' merits; both were certainly, in their own ways, controversial. Corot's seemingly "unassuming" romanticism¹⁷ in an era of Salon-controlled classicism and subject painting was as à rebours in its day as Whistler's sustained battles with middle-class narrative painting and the critics...