The Aesthetic Experiencing of Colour: Tracing the connection between aesthetic bildung and chromatic encounters in Walter Pater’s Gaston de Latour

Walter Pater’s unfinished Gaston de Latour (18 88–94) was meant to be the second instalment of a trilogy of novels that began with Marius the Epicurean (1885). Like its predecessor, this work follows the aesthetic education of a sensitive young man in a period of cultural, historical and aesthetic turmoil. My proposed paper argues that Gaston’s aesthetic education is deeply shaped through his encounters with chromatic phenomena, both natural and artificial. Lene Østermark-Johansen explains that “the novel is a study in the colours of decadence and destruction” (2020: 27), an insight which I would like to examine within the context of Gaston’s aesthetic development in the novel. I propose that the moral conundrum that Gaston faces in the text—“either a consuming decadence or a quickening aesthetic response” (Pater and Monsman, 1995: xlii)—is expressed through his perceptual engagement with colours. The dialogical relationship between past and present, characteristic of Pater’s fiction, is particularly discernible in Gaston through his treatment of chromatic experience, in which sixteenth-century France is explicitly connected with late nineteenth-century England. Within this context, Pater situates Gaston—a diaphanous, nearly colourless figure—amid decadent French portraits, artefacts, furnishings, and architectural spaces, juxtaposing them with their modern English counterparts. If “by referring to an absent kind of material, colour words point to the idea of materiality, the idea that visual art is corporeal, sensual” (Rey Conquer, 2019: 2), I argue that Pater frames Gaston’s aesthetic refinement as dependent upon the way he absorbs, reflects, and refracts the colours he encounters, so that his physical experience of colour becomes the main feature driving the plot of the aesthetic novel.