Augustus
Leopold Egg
was born in London on 2nd May 1816. He attended Henry Sass Drawing
School in preparation
for entering the Royal
Academy.
His painting A
Spanish Girl
was accepted by the Academy in 1838. At about this time he formed
The
Clique,
a sketching club, with William Powell Frith
and Richard
Dadd.
In the 1840s Egg began painting comic scenes from Shakespeare, Lord
Byron and Walter Scott.
He
also painted historical pictures such as Queen
Elizabeth Discovers She is No Longer Young
(1848), The
Life and Death of Buckingham
(1855) and The
Night Before Naseby
(1859).
In 1859 Egg produced a series of three paintings called
Past
and Present.
Influenced by the moral paintings of William
Hogarth, the pictures tell the story of a man that Egg knew, whose
wife had been unfaithful. In the first picture the husband discovers
his wife's infidelity; he holds the letter that has enabled him to
discover the betrayal and crushes a picture
of his wife's lover under his foot. The second and third pictures
both take place at the same moment, five years later, after the death
of the father. One picture shows the children alone in the home, whereas
the mother is living under the Adelphi arches in London.
Egg, a friend of the writer Charles Dickens,
suffered from chronic respiratory disease. In 1863 Egg was advised
that his health would improve if he lived in Africa. This move was
unsuccessful and Augustus
Leopold Egg died in Algiers on 25th March, 1863.
Augustus
Leopold Egg, Past and Present (1859)
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