Past and Present (paintings)
Past and Present is the title usually given to the series of three
Painting
The triptych depicts the discovery and disastrous consequences of a wife's adultery on a middle-class Victorian family. The artist leaves the viewer to determine whether the woman should be condemned or pitied. The paintings reflected fears that public morality and family life were imperiled by the recent Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which reformed the law of divorce by moving jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil court, and made divorce a realistic prospect for the middle classes.
The works – a visual
At the original 1858 exhibition, the first painting – the discovery in the drawing-room – was hung flanked by the two other paintings, which depict parallel scenes several years later. When originally exhibited, the central painting was raised slightly above the flanking images.
Ruskin's "Academy Notes" (8 May 1858) described the three works:
In the central piece 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 a vault on the river shore.
Each painting measures 63.5 centimetres (25.0 in) by 76.2 centimetres (30.0 in). They were all donated to the
Past and Present, No. 1
The first painting shows the
Past and Present, No. 2
The second painting shows a night scene, several years later, in a dark and sparsely-furnished bedroom shortly after the death of the heartbroken husband. The children are older now: the younger one kneels in a white
Past and Present, No. 3
The third painting is also a night scene. The details of the cloud and moon show it is the same evening as depicted in the second painting. The fallen wife is resting in the detritus-strewn shadows beneath the Adelphi Arches, by the River Thames. She clutches a bundle of rags from which protrude the emaciated legs of an infant, perhaps the fruit of her affair, either asleep or dead. Posters on the wall advertise two contemporary plays, Victims by Tom Taylor and The Cure for Love by Tom Parry, both tales of unhappy marriages, and also "Pleasure excursions to Paris", perhaps a reference to the novel by Balzac in the first picture. She looks up from her place in the gutter to the moon and stars above.
A similarly watery destination for fallen women was depicted in
References
- ^ Charlotte Mitchell, ‘Panton , Jane Ellen (1847–1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 30 Oct 2016
- Tate Gallery:
- Past and Present, No. 1 - Image, Short Text
- Past and Present, No. 2 - Image, Short Text
- Past and Present, No. 3 - Image, Short Text
- Pictorial Victorians: the inscription of values in word and image, Julia Thomas, pp. 145–159.
- Pre-Raphaelites re-viewed, Marcia R. Pointon, p. 51.
- Culture and adultery: the novel, the newspaper, and the law, 1857-1914, Barbara Leckie, pp. 73–76.
- Affairs of the hearth: Victorian poetry and domestic narrative, Rod Edmond, pp. 114–115
- Woman and the demon: the life of a Victorian myth, Nina Auerbach, p. 154.
- The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns, Stephen Kern, p. 149.
- A Dramatic Reading of Augustus Leopold Egg’s Untitled Triptych, Tate Papers, Spring 2007
Further reading
- T. J. Edelstein, 'Augustus Egg's Triptych: A Narrative of Victorian Adultery', The Burlington Magazine, CXXV/961 (April 1983)