Imaginary Portraits

Four invented lives, each a study in what a mind does with beauty: a Watteau seen through a girl's diary, a Dutch philosopher, a German prince, a young Frenchman. Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance — that we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame — became the motto of the aesthetes and frightened him so much he withdrew it; these 1887 pieces are that argument made into people. Forty-eight Dutch plates by Vermeer and Jan Steen, all quiet rooms and serving girls, run alongside Pater's imagined lives like a second text.