Past and Present, No. 3

The third panel of Past and Present follows the fallen wife years later to a desolate urban bridge, where she shelters beneath an arch with her illegitimate infant while the moon reveals the Thames below. The companion panels (nos. 1 and 2) have established what has been lost; this final image offers no redemption. Victorian social debate around 'fallen women' was intense: reformers, novelists, and painters alike contested whether seduced or adulterous women deserved sympathy or condemnation, and Egg's closing image is deliberately ambiguous — the woman's fate is exposure, poverty, and implied death, but Egg does not moralise in caption or pose. The moonlit arch and the river below carry an unmistakable suggestion of imminent suicide, making this one of the period's most psychologically precise images of social exclusion.

Oil on canvas dominated by nocturnal blues and the pale silver of moonlight filtering under the bridge. The restricted palette concentrates emotional weight on the solitary figure and her sleeping infant, while the vast dark space of the arch diminishes the human form against social indifference.