The Life of Buckingham (c. 1855): Art, History and Details

The Life of Buckingham (c. 1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Augustus Leopold Egg (British, 1816-c. 1863).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Augustus Leopold Egg’s The Life of Buckingham depicts a fictional moment in the debauched, roguish life of George Villiers (1628–1687), 2nd Duke of Buckingham (seated at the center, wearing white). Although the scene is invented, the merrymakers and courtesans depicted around the table (among them King Charles II, to Buckingham’s right) were characters the duke would have personally known and were familiar to Victorian audiences who delighted in the cautionary tale of excess.

Object facts

• Title: The Life of Buckingham
• Date: c. 1855
• Creator attribution: Augustus Leopold Egg (British, 1816-c. 1863)
• Culture: England, 19th century, Victorian
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on board
• Dimensions: Framed: 54.1 x 64.5 x 10.2 cm (21 5/16 x 25 3/8 x 4 in.); Unframed: 30.5 x 40.5 cm (12 x 15 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Paintings
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 2014.373

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Selected Pictures. In the Collection of James Dugdale, Esq., Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire. 'The Life of Buckingham'." The Art Journal [...] Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition 4, no. 46 (October 1, 1865): 296.
• "Minor Topics of the Month: Egg's Paintings of the 'Life and Death of Buckingham'. The Art Journal [...] Illustrated Catalogue of the International Exhibition 5, no. 51 (March 1, 1866): 93-95.
• Temple, A. G. The Art of Painting in the Queen's Reign; Being a Glance at Some of the Painters and Paintings of the British School During the Last Sixty Years. London, United Kingdom: Chapman and Hall, 1897.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.