Today is Easter Sunday, so this week’s picture is an Egg – a work by Augustus Leopold Egg, to be precise, on the theme of a wife’s adultery discovered by her husband. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition in 1858, together with two companion works by the same artist, which together complete a sad tale of domestic woe. The second and third pictures are set at night, in different parts of London but at the exact same time, some years after the denouement taking place in the picture reproduced here. In one of them, the adulterous mother’s two young children sit alone, in an ill-furnished bedroom, as a full moon illuminates the night sky outside. In the other, the mother herself, clutching the love-child produced by her ill-conceived liaison, lies despairingly under the arches of the Adelphi, by the side of the Thames, contemplating the same moon shining through her estranged daughters’ bedroom window.
The three pictures in Egg’s triptych – which have been kept together to this day, in the collections of Tate Britain – were originally exhibited in a line, with the picture shown on this page in the middle, even though, in terms of strict narrative chronology, it shows the earliest episode in the story. This was the artist’s daring and unusual way of showing how the central event, the act of adultery, has literally sundered a family. Egg gave his pictures no collective title, preferring to exhibit them only with a fragment from an invented diary: “August the 4th. Have just heard that B has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to...
