From Egg to Bacon - English Painting 1850-1950

Linda Smith

BA(Hons) MA

This talk gives an account of developments in English painting (and the occasional sculpture) from the days of the pre Raphaelites to the aftermath of World War Two. This was a particularly fertile period in the history of Art, and the talk pays attention to the way in which developments in Paris were received by the London Art world, and how British Artists contributed to the exciting exchange of new ideas.

Victorian artists like Augustus Egg, a friend of Charles Dickens, created popular works with a high moral tone. The Pre-Raphaelites challenged the status quo with vivid colours and complex decoration. They initiated a fertile era in English art, at the end of which Francis Bacon erupted onto the scene.

Linda Smith is an art historian, guide and lecturer at London's Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

web links:

Augustus Leopold Egg (1816-1863):

He aspired to be a Hogarthian painter - moralising, humorous, popular. Along with Richard Dadd (of The Fairy Feller 's Masterstroke fame - see below), he was a member of the artists' group called "The Clique". He was also part of the literary circle of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. He admired the younger Pre-Raphaelites. He engaged in charity work and amateur theatricals. He travelled to southern Europe for his poor health.
His most famous work is in Tate Britain, Past and Present, a narrative triptych about adultery and its tragic consequences: (click on an image to see it enlarged).

Past and Present, No. 1 1858
This is the first scene in a triptych, or series of three paintings, on the consequences of adultery. A woman lies at her husband's feet. He holds a letter, evidence of her unfaithfulness, and stamps on a portrait miniature of her lover. On the left, the girls' house of cards collapses, signifying the breakdown of the family. The cards were supported by a novel by the French writer Balzac, famous for his tales of adultery. And an apple has been cut in two. One half, representing the wife, has fallen to the floor. The other, representing the husband, has been stabbed to the core.

Past and Present, No. 2 1858
When this triptych was first exhibited the drawing-room scene was hung between this painting and the final scene. The writer John Ruskin wrote: 'the husband discovers his wife's infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their lost mother, and their mother, from behind a boat under the vault of the river shore.' Ruskin's comments show that audiences were expected to 'read' pictures like novels.

Past and Present, No. 3 1858
The final scene in this series of three paintings is set under the Adelphi arches, by the River Thames. The Art Journal described them as 'the lowest of all the profound deeps of human abandonment in this metropolis'. The woman shelters a young child, the result of her affair. The posters behind her advertise two plays - Victims and The Cure for Love - and 'Pleasure excursions to Paris'. These are ironic comments on her situation. This is a social moralist series of paintings but it is left to the viewer to decide whether the woman is to be pitied or condemned.

more Egg: wikipedia wikimedia Tate