A lover of beauty in all of its forms, but especially of the male figure, Walter Pater suffered the misfortune of being incarnate in an ungainly body surmounted by a large, unlovely head. His contemporaries were invariably struck by the disparity between Pater's unprepossessing person and his finely wrought prose, in which he celebrates a beauty which no mirror could ever return. Pater ends the most artful of his Imaginary Portraits – of Watteau, the ‘Prince of Court Painters’ – with a sentence that might serve as his own epitaph: ‘He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’

Such a temperament is intrinsically elegiac, fixated on the fleeting – the heady scent of roses the moment before they fade or on the handsome faces of the freshly dead. These ‘still lifes’ are artfully planted throughout Pater's writings, perhaps most memorably at the end of Emerald Uthwart, the most self-illuminating of his imaginary portraits. Two schoolboy companions, their friendship patterned on the ‘Greek’ model, enlist in the army, serve heroically, but are court-martialed for an unspecified crime. The elder is shot before a firing squad, the younger discharged in disgrace. Emerald returns to his birthplace, where he dies of an old gunshot wound and is buried amidst a riot of richly scented roses.