Augustus Egg

In 1858 Augustus Egg showed three canvases at the Royal Academy, London's leading exhibition, that tell one story out of order. In the first, a husband has just learned of his wife's adultery and she lies on the floor at his feet. The other two take place years later. His daughters sit alone in a bare room, and their mother shelters under the arches by the Thames, all of them looking at the same moon. The set is known today as Past and Present, and it is the work most people know him by.

Egg was the son of Joseph Egg, a prosperous London gunsmith, and in the late 1830s he belonged to the Clique, a sketching club of young painters around the artist Richard Dadd. Unlike most of that circle, he took the young Pre-Raphaelites seriously and bought work from William Holman Hunt, one of their founders. He was also a close friend of Charles Dickens. He helped the novelist set up the Guild of Literature and Art, a fund for struggling writers and artists, and in 1857 he played the ship's cook in The Frozen Deep, a play by the writer Wilkie Collins staged at Dickens's house.

He became a full member of the Royal Academy in 1860. In 1862 he painted The Travelling Companions, two young women in identical dresses facing each other in a railway carriage, one asleep and one reading, while a sunlit Mediterranean coast passes the window. Poor health had already sent him south for the winters, and in March 1863 he died in Algiers, aged 46.