Past and Present, No. 2

The second panel of Past and Present shifts forward in time to show the two daughters of the collapsed household — now adolescents — gazing from an attic window at the moon. The same moonlight also illuminates their fallen mother sheltering under a bridge in the third panel, a visual rhyme Egg constructed across simultaneous exhibition to demand that viewers trace the chain of cause and effect. While the daughters have not sinned, they bear the social stigma of their mother's disgrace: their prospects for respectable marriage are ruined. The attic setting — bare, cramped, descending from the comfortable parlour of panel one — materialises their social fall. Victorian audiences, trained by Hogarth to read painted interiors as moral thermometers, would have understood every detail of their diminished surroundings.

Oil on canvas with a palette that bridges the warm domestic interior of panel one and the cold nocturnal blues of panel three. The attic's sparse furnishing is rendered with the same fidelity Egg brought to the prosperous drawing room, making poverty legible in every textural detail.