Augustus Leopold Egg was born in London on 2 May 1816. He was the son of a wealthy gunsmith. He attended the Henry Sass Drawing School and entered the RA in 1836. He was a member of ‘The Clique’, a group of artists comprising Richard Dadd, Henry Nelson O’Neil, William Powell Frith and others in the late 1830s, who were united by their opposition to the conservative policies and artistic philosophies at that time espoused by the Royal Academy. Egg’s painting A Spanish Girl was accepted by the RA in 1838 although a combination of poor health and great wealth meant that he had neither the ability, nor the need to be prolific – in his entire career, he showed only 28 paintings at the RA. Egg sought to combine popularity with moral and social activism and was profoundly influenced by the work of the author Charles Dickens. With Dickens, he founded the Guild of Literature and Art, a philanthropic organisation established to provide welfare payments to struggling artists and writers. He participated, as both actor and costume designer, in amateur theatricals, which were often conducted for charitable purposes. In January 1857 he took a part in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen North, which starred Dickens and was performed at his house. (Egg played the part of John Want, the ship’s cook). The play was also performed before Queen Victoria and then again for charity. Egg took the lead role in a play written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton to raise funds for the organisation. His self-portrait in the role may be found at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath. Dickens described Egg as a ‘dear gentle little fellow’, ‘always sweet-tempered, humorous, conscientious, thoroughly good, and thoroughly beloved.’ In the 1840s Egg began painting comic scenes from Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Like other members of The Clique, he saw himself as a follower of Hogarth. Evidence of his interest in Hogarthian moral themes may be taken from his paired paintings The Life and Death of Buckingham (1855), depicting the dissolute life and sordid death of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Egg’s paintings often took a humorous view of their subjects, as in his Queen Elizabeth Discovers she is no longer Young (1848) which secured his election as ARA that year. Unlike most other members of The Clique, Egg also admired the Pre-Raphaelites; he bought work from the young William Holman Hunt and shared ideas on colour theory with him. Egg’s gloomy Charles I Raising his Standard at Nottingham (1852) was part of an unsucessful attempt to gain the commission to decorate the Peer’s Corridor in the Palace of Westminster. In 1859 Egg produced a series of three paintings called Past and Present (Tate Gallery). Influenced by the moral paintings of William Hogarth, they tell the story of a man who Egg knew, whose wife had been unfaithful. It depicted three separate scenes, one portraying 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 both take place at the same moment, five years later, after the death of the father. One picture depicts the children alone at home in poverty, whereas the mother is living under the Adelphi arches in London. The painting’s use of flashback – with the central scene occurring in the past – has been seen by some as a precursor of modern cinema. Egg was 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. He was elected RA in 1860. He suffered from chronic respiratory disease and spent his later years in the warmer climate of continental Europe, where he painted Travelling Companions (1862) (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) which is a carefully detailed study depicting two near-identical young women that has sometimes been interpreted as an attempt to represent two sides of the same person. Egg lived in a house called ‘The Elms’ in Kensington, but was advised by his doctors to travel to sunnier climes for the sake of his health. He journeyed to Italy, then to the south of France, and finally to Algiers, where he died at the young age of 47 on 25 March 1863.