Imaginary Portraits

by Walter Pater · 1887

Four linked portraits of restless, gifted outsiders across history — a melancholy painter who reshapes Parisian taste, a mysterious youth who brings a golden age to a medieval town before it turns on him, and a Dutch philosopher who rejects the comfort and beauty he was born to.

Books mentioned in Imaginary Portraits (1)

• Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost: “they have begun to talk of these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them, set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut”