Augustus Egg: Encyclopedia - Augustus Egg

Augustus Egg

Augustus Leopold Egg (May 21, 1816 - March 26, 1863) was a Victorian artist best known for his modern triptych Past and Present (1858), which depicts the break up of a middle-class Victorian family.

Egg was a member of The Clique, a group of artists founded by Richard Dadd and others in the 1840s. Egg sought to combine popularity with moral and social activism, in line with the literary work of his friend Dickens. With Dickens he set up the "Guild of Literature and Art", a philanthropic organisation intended to provide welfare payments to struggling artists and writers. He acted the lead role in a play written by Bulwer-Lytton to raise funds for the organisation. His self-portrait in the role is in Hospitalfield House in Arbroath.

Egg's early paintings were generally illustrations of literary subjects. Like other members of The Clique he saw himself as a follower of Hogarth. His interest in Hogarthian moral themes is evidenced in his paired paintings The Life and Death of Buckingham, depicting the dissolute life and sordid death of the Restoration rake.

However, unlike most other members of The Clique, Egg also admired the Pre-Raphaelites, buying work from the young William Holman Hunt. His own triptych, known as Past and Present was influenced by Hunt's work. The triptych depicted three separate scenes, one depicting a prosperous middle-class family and the other two depicting poor and isolated figures - two young girls in a bedsit and a homeless woman with a baby. The viewer was expected to read a series of visual clues that linked together these three scenes, to reveal that the prosperous family in the central scene is in the process of disintegrating because of the mother's adultery. The two outer scenes depict the separated mother and children a few years later, now living in poverty. The painting's use of flashback - the central scene is occurring in the past - has been seen as a precursor of cinema.

Always in poor health Egg spent his later years in the warmer climate of continental Europe where he painted Travelling Companions, an ambiguous image of two near-identical young women, which has sometimes been interpreted as an attempt to represent two sides of the same person.

Egg was also an active organiser of exhibitions, being admired by fellow-artists for his dedication and fair mindedness. He was one of the organisers of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857.

Category: British artists

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