Augustus Leopold Egg was one of the most accomplished narrative painters of the High Victorian period, an artist who brought the moral seriousness of Dickens's novels into the medium of painting and produced in Past and Present one of the defining images of nineteenth-century English social commentary.
Augustus Leopold Egg, R.A. (May 2, 1816 – March 26, 1863) was an English Victorian painter best known for his 1858 modern-life triptych Past and Present. Born in London to a prosperous Alsatian gunmaking family, he enrolled as a probationer in the Royal Academy Schools in 1836 and began exhibiting at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions in 1838. Early in his career he became a founding member of "The Clique," a group formed in the late 1830s around Richard Dadd, William Powell Frith, and others, in conscious dissent from the prevailing taste of the Academy.
Egg was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1848, the same year his historical painting Queen Elizabeth Discovers She is no Longer Young drew critical attention at the annual exhibition, and was elected a full Royal Academician in 1860. Although never a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was among the few established Royal Academicians sympathetic to its aims, and he adopted elements of the movement's intense colour and exact detail in his own modern-life subjects. His paintings are held by Tate Britain, including the complete Past and Presenttriptych, as well as by the Royal Academy of Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museums, and other British institutions.