poseur

We find Wilkes as a poseur on literature in one of these entertaining letters to “dearest Polly.”

It is an awful thing when a poseur ceases to pose, when an egoist becomes a human being.

Poet and poseur he was, the strangest combination ever seen in man.

The peculiar charm of these Letters is that they are so evidently private; there is nothing of the poseur about them.

And Whistler, he declared, was a "poseur" and the picture "a colossal piece of pyramidal impudence."