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!.