SOURCE: “Biography and the Objective Fallacy: Pater's Experiment in ‘A Prince of Court Painters,’” in Biography, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 147-60.

In the following essay, Candido describes Pater's portrait of Jean-Antoine Watteau as radically incorporating multiple layers of perspective. Candido also discusses Pater's inclusion of himself as “editor” in order to demonstrate the impossibility of objective biography.

An enlightening though largely unacknowledged essay by Charles Whibley, “The Limits of Biography,” appeared in England in 1897 in a periodical entitled The Nineteenth Century.¹ The essay reflects new biographical standards which marked a trend in the later part of the century toward an even more inward vision of the biographical subject than either Carlyle or the American Transcendentalists had provided, a vision not essentially moral or metaphysical (as it was for the Transcendentalists), but rather poetic and imaginative. Here is Whibley on the subject:

the biographer's first necessity is invention rather...