EGG, AUGUSTUS LEOPOLD (1816-1863) , English genre painter, was born on May 2, 1816, in London, the son of a gunmaker. He was a pupil of Henry Sass, and then studied at the Royal Academy; he became R.A. in 1860. He travelled in Italy with Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1853. Egg was an excellent actor and played in Dickens's company of amateurs; one of his best parts was as John Want in Collins's Frozen Deep. He was famous in his day for small anecdotal pictures, of which the London public galleries possess several examples. He died at Algiers on March 26, 1863.
Among his principal pictures may be named: 1843, the "Intro duction of Sir Piercie Shafton and Halbert Glendinning" (from Scott's Monastery) ; 1846, "Buckingham Rebuffed"; 1848, "Queen Elizabeth discovers she is no longer young"; 185o, "Peter the Great sees Catharine for the first time" ; 1854, "Charles I. raising the Standard at Nottingham" (a study) ; 1855, the "Life and Death of Buckingham"; 1857 and 1858, two subjects from Thackeray's Esmond; 1858, "Past and Present, a triple picture of a faithless wife"; 1859, the "Night before Naseby"; 186o, his last exhibited work, the Dinner Scene from The Taming of the Shrew.