Date: 27-03-2005
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 19th Century      

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 4^th. 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 lay her head. What a fall hers has been!”

Egg’s paintings caused a considerable stir when they were seen for the first time. The critic for The Times admired “Mr A. L. Egg’s ‘London trilogy’”, considering it to be “as tragic as any that ever held an Athenian theatre mute, though its actors wear coat and crinoline instead of peplum and chiton.” The author refrained, however, from further comment, not wishing to “mar the sad story” by attempting to “tell it in a line”. A much more circumstantial account, and one likely to reflect the intentions of its creator, was written by Egg’s friend and fellow-painter William Holman Hunt, in 1864.

“The centre canvas contained the main spring of the whole story. A husband of middle age, who, by his carpet-bag, seemed to have just returned from a journey, had thrown himself down in a chair, his right hand holding a note – the wife, apparently having been immediately before confronted with this evidence of her guilt, had fallen to the floor, hiding her face and throbbing out her shame… But there are two other beings in the room – children who are disturbed from their play by this strange scene. They have been building card castles, and now are turning round in wonder. Upon them, too, the sin shall be visited, in whispers of pity at the least, for all their years to come. The room is papered with red, lurid paper, throwing a hot an oppressive reflection upon all the objects in the room.”

Adultery was a topical theme in the mid-nineteenth century. The Infant’s Custody Act of 1839 had enshrined in law the principle that any female adulterer be banned from her children. In 1857, the year before Egg painted his picture, the Matrimonial Causes Act had been passed, making divorce easier to obtain both for men and women. Egg’s painting embodied a widespread disquiet, a fear that the moral fabric of the nation was being eroded. Divorce, which had been regarded as an affliction of the fickle French, was making a home for itself in Britain. Egg may have intended to allude to this by having the two girls in his picture build their house of cards – time-honoured symbol of false hopes – on a volume of Balzac’s fiction. Balzac, whose novels are full of adulterous relationships, was a byword for moral laxity at the time. The insinuation, presumably, is that the adultress has been corrupted by his work.

Egg’s picture is full of echoes of other pictures, most obviously perhaps recalling Hogarth’s “modern moral subjects” such as The Harlot’s Progress. Like Hogarth, he paints his interior as if it were the scene of a crime, filling it with incriminating evidence: the letter of revelation, the split and rotten apple, the knife nearby pointing like a dagger at the husband’s heart. Even the paintings on the wall are symbolically charged. The wife’s portrait hangs below an Expulsion from Paradise, the husband’s beneath Thr Abandoned, a well known painting of a derelict hulk by Clarkson Stanfield. The picture is also like a chaotic modern version of Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Wedding – a work that had recently been acquired by the National Gallery when Egg painted The Adultress. Instead of showing husband and wife hand in hand, as van Eyck had done, he shows them terminally separated, flung apart as if by a centrifuge, such is the violence of the diagonal at which she sprawls across the floor of the room.

Egg’s picture was also, partly, his answer to his friend Holman Hunt’s own, rather more sentimental depiction of an adulterous woman, painted just a few years before and entitled The Awakening Conscience. There are certain similarities between that work, in which a dark-haired woman suddenly rises from the lap of her lover, eyes ablaze with repentant zeal, and The Adultress. Each revolves around the relationship between a man and a woman, and each is set in a plush Victorian interior, in which a mirror has been given considerable prominence. But whereas the mirror in Hunt’s optimistic work reflects a sunlit garden, as if to symbolise the Eden of moral purity to which his adultress feels so powerfully drawn, the mirror in Egg’s altogether darker painting simply shows a door open to anonymous city streets – the wilderness into which his unhappy heroine’s sin has condemned her to be expelled. Egg presented his audience with a secular version of the Fall of Man, or, in this case, of woman.