THE NOTION OF BEAUTY, in its various meanings and manifestations, has long fascinated authors and critics. Its appeal fuelled the artistic endeavours of the nineteenth century, captivated its audiences, and haunted the literary movements of the last 100 years. Walter Pater, in the opening lines of The Renaissance, a touchstone for Victorian aestheticism, observed how attempts to ‘define beauty’ have most often been conducted ‘in the abstract’. Pater’s call for the ‘student of æsthetics’ to observe beauty in its specific instances – in separate works of art, experienced by individual observers – holds in play the idea of beauty both as an eternal value and a fleeting impression: a universal truth and nothing more than a fluctuating emotion subject to the vagaries of time and change. In his conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater declares that ‘art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass’. And yet, like Keats’s Grecian urn that suspends one beautiful moment in art, many attempts have been made to halt such passings, and surrender worldly time to poetic timing. The narratives of literature may be destined to end, but, as Keats’s urn implies, the single portrait of beauty, captured in painting or in sculpture, may exist, though paralysed, throughout time. With the rise of photographic art, beauty in the physical form was ever more susceptible to capture; as the early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in 1874, ‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me.’