"August the 4th - Have just heard that B - has been dead..."
May 29, 2017 2:53 PM   Subscribe

In 1858, the painter Augustus Egg (1816-63) exhibited what turned out to be a much-debated triptych on the aftermath of a wife's affair. Now titled Past and Present 1, 2, and 3, the triptych originally appeared with this lengthy caption: "'August the 4th - Have just heard that B - has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!'"

Then and now, the triptych has been the focus of considerable attention both because of its subject matter and its form. Despite the current numbering, the paintings were actually hung 3, 1, 2, with #1 set in the "past" and #3 and #2 at the same moment in the "present." The detailed symbolism of the first painting, from the apple at the front to the two paintings in the background (one of them a now-lost painting, The Abandoned, by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield), is akin to that of the work to which it is most commonly compared, William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience; critics have also noted similarities in #3 to G. F. Watts' Found Drowned.

Besides Past and Present, Egg is best-known today for The Travelling Companions. Egg's friend William Powell Frith was famous for paintings demanding similarly close readings; his own multi-painting take on a moral decline-and-fall is The Road to Ruin. In addition to Frith, Egg's close artistic circle included the fairy painter Richard Dadd (very previously).
posted by thomas j wise (11 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thanks to Eyebrows McGee for some link-vetting.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:02 PM on May 29, 2017


The footnotes in the "detailed symbolism" are driving me crazy. It's like David Foster Wallace but without the irony. Taken together, they make an extremely informative and thoughtful essay, but you have to do the organizing yourself. Would've been far more powerful if the footnotes were the body instead and maybe they had some subheads.
posted by radicalawyer at 3:19 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Last month in London I got to see the paintings of A Rake's Progress, an 18th century morality tale. They seemed sort of interesting at first blush and then a very well informed volunteer docent started explaining the story of the paintings to us, the narrative and all the details that illustrate it. It was terrific and made me appreciate the depth and context of this kind of work of art.
posted by Nelson at 3:32 PM on May 29, 2017 [6 favorites]


These are magnificent. Egg seems to epitomize much of what was great and not so great about Victorian culture. Plus he is the master of the voluminous dress.
posted by Modest House at 3:56 PM on May 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


These kind of morality things seem to have a range of tone from stern seriousness to comedy. I prefer the latter, or a bit of it, as A Rake's Progress seems to have. #3 is nice.
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 4:31 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


More in the delightful genre of Moralistic Victorian Series of Paintings: Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and Course of Empire.
posted by theodolite at 4:47 PM on May 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


Acquisition
Presented by Sir Alec and Lady Martin in memory of their daughter Nora 1918
... Surely not?
posted by clew at 4:56 PM on May 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


This feels really trivial but: Damn #3 is gorgeous. And it would make a totally awesome wraparound cover for a book.
posted by egypturnash at 6:52 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Many thanks for this post, tjw! I'd heard of Egg in connection with Richard Dadd, but had never taken the trouble to check out his work - The Travelling Companions is delightful. Moralisers are so often hyprocites, but Egg seems to have been a genuinely good egg.
posted by misteraitch at 1:03 AM on May 30, 2017


Great post, thanks! Might as well get the most salient issue out of the way; to quote the "best-known" link: "Augustus Leopold Egg (1816-63) enjoyed one of the most ridiculous names in the history of art." I knew nothing about his work in general and the triptych in particular, and now I'm much better informed. I do, however, have to complain about an entirely unrelated matter. From the "were actually hung 3, 1, 2" link:
HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

Nord, Deborah Epstein. “On Augustus Egg’s Triptych, May 1858.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].
No date! What the hell is going on here? Are we not supposed to care when Nord published this excellent essay? Is it not supposed to matter when it came in the history of art criticism? Will people in the future, assuming the internet survives, not care what century it was from? Come on, people, I know online publication is different, but damn, throw those of us who still care about chronology a bone.
posted by languagehat at 8:55 AM on May 30, 2017


That Athenaeum review in full, courtesy of Google Books:
Mr Egg's unnamed picture is divided into three compartments, each more ghastly and terrible than the other, till in the last we come to such a sink of misery and loathsomeness, painted with such an unhealthy determination to dissect horror and to catalogue the dissecting-room that we turn from what is a real and possible terror as from an impure thing that seems out of place in a gallery of laughing brightness, where young, unstained, unpainted and happy faces come to chat and trifle. There must be a line drawn as to where the horrors that should not be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line.
posted by verstegan at 2:28 PM on May 30, 2017


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