Autumn, Aestheticism, and Walter Pater

After the pause of.... more days that I promised myself... I have finally uploaded another episode!

Today's meditation turned out a good deal of a critique of aestheticism in its historic sense than I anticipated, but I hope you get the main idea. In any case, I hope the sources below can get you thinking on aestheticism, which will hopefully help us to reflect on the performance of autumn that confronts us every year, not only outside in nature, but in our own behaviors.

This is the V&A article I mentioned, an amazing introduction into the aesthetic movement.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/an-introduction-to-the-aesthetic-movement

Bonus V&A material on their aestheticism page: https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/aestheticism

Here is a link to a PDF of the Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater that I used: http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts/texts/Pater/Works/ren_1873.pdf

Although... you might also want a more general source about Him and His Thing from the British Libarary: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/walter-pater-studies-in-the-history-of-the-renaissance

For the more official sources, even though I didn't mention those specifically, I used some of the amazing jstor articles. I can't share all of them, as you need an account for most, but here are some of the open access links.

A chapter from Carsten Strathausen's amazing book The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision Around 1900: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807863237_strathausen.8

The New Aestheticism, a great book compiled by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, most of which is open access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155j77d

An article titled "Whistler's Pastels" by A. E. Gallatin: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20560231

An article titled "A Sentence by Walter Pater" from The Journal of English and Germanic Philology: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27701015 (This one is absolutely wild! It's from 1920, so aestheticism was still very busy influencing Art Deco, among other things.)