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''Past and Present'' is the title usually given to the series of three oil paintings made by Augustus Egg in 1858, which are designed to be exhibited together as a triptych. When first exhibited at Royal Academy in 1858 the paintings were untitled, but accompanied by a fictional quotation from a diary, ''August the 4th – Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now 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!''. ==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 imperilled 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 morality tale based on a single moment – were influenced by William Holman Hunt's 1853 painting ''The Awakening Conscience''. It is not certain how they acquired the title ''Past and Present'', which is not known to have been used by the artist, and is first recorded in the auction catalogue for Egg's works after his death in 1863. It is surmised that it derives from a misreading of John Ruskin's ''Academy Notes'', in which the untitled works are discussed below a review of a painting with that title. 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:
Each painting measures by . They were all donated to the Tate Gallery in 1918 by Sir Alec and Lady Martin in memory of their daughter Nora, and are now usually given the rather prosaic titles ''Past and Present, No. 1'', ''Past and Present, No. 2'' and ''Past and Present, No. 3'', although occasionally they are titled ''Misfortune'', ''Prayer'', and ''Despair''. The number order does not represent the way they were exhibited (the first scene was shown in the centre), but rather an implied conventional Hogarthian progress of social decline from middle-class prosperity through genteel poverty and, finally, to destitution. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Past and Present (paintings)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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