Walter Pater (1839-1894), was an English critic, essayist, and humanist who argued that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose. "Art for art's sake" is a core principle of Aestheticism, the movement he helped found. Pater's exquisite writing style and bold ideas exerted a powerful influence on such writers as Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens and has had lasting influence on the field of art criticism.
