William Maw Egley was a British artist of the Victorian era

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

. The son of the miniaturist William Egley

William Egley

William Egley , was an English miniature painter.-Life and work:Egley was born at Doncaster in 1798. Shortly after the boy's birth his father moved to Nottingham, and became confidential agent to the Walkers of Eastwood. The gift of a box of colours which William received in early youth...

, he studied under his father. His early works were illustrations of literary subjects typical of the period, such as Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

. These were similar to the work of The Clique

The Clique

The Clique was a group of English artists formed by Richard Dadd in the late 1830s. Other members were Augustus Egg, Alfred Elmore, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O'Neil, John Phillip and Edward Matthew Ward....

. William Powell Frith

William Powell Frith

William Powell Frith , was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1852...

, one of The Clique, hired Egley to add backgrounds to his own work. Egley soon developed a style influenced by Frith, including domestic and childhood subjects. Most of his paintings were humorous or "feelgood" genre scenes of urban and rural life, depicting such subjects as harvest festivals and contemporary fashions. His best known painting, Omnibus Life in London (Tate Gallery

Tate Gallery

The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...

) is a comic scene of people squashed together in the busy, cramped public transport of the era.

Egley always showed great interest in specifics of costume, to which he paid detailed attention, but his paintings were often criticised for their hard, clumsy style.

In the 1860s Egley adopted the fashion for romanticised 18th century subjects. Though he produced a very large number of reliably salable paintings, his work was never critically admired.