(b London, 1826; d 20 Feb 1916). English painter. He was the son of the portrait painter and miniaturist William Egley (1798–1870). Under his father’s tutelage he began painting around the age of 14. His earliest works were the sort of fashionable literary illustrations of Molière and Shakespeare that Charles Dickens satirized in the first issue of Household Words (1850). Egley was hired by William Powell Frith to paint backgrounds, and under Frith’s influence began painting domestic genre scenes, especially of children’s play, for example Coming Events Cast their Shadow before (1861; U. Bath, Holburne of Menstrie Mus.), in which a boy blows a horn loudly in a girl’s ear. He recorded the rural custom of cheering largess in Hullo Largess! A Harvest Scene in Norfolk (1860; priv. col., see Reynolds, p. 100). His best-known work is Omnibus Life in London (1859; London, Tate), which shows the crowded interior of an omnibus with a mother holding on to her fashionably dressed young son as he squirms on her lap. Egley’s efforts were often criticized for harshness of execution and lapses of scale or perspective. He had a special interest, recorded in his account book, in the detailed rendering of costume, especially the elaborately crocheted pantaloons and drawers fashionable for children. These are painted with great care and exactness. He also wrote of such undergarments very extensively in his descriptions of the paintings. He returned to costume and historical pieces in the 1860s, employing a mannered Victorian vision of the 18th century. His accounts list over 1000 paintings, but reviews were disappointing for the greater part of his life.