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Tag Archives: Hogarth

fabricHere at the Riskies we return quite frequently to the topic of London’s Foundling Hospital, founded by sea captain Thomas Coram, composer George Handel, and artist William Hogarth. Today I’m sharing some recent finds I made–one is this quite splendid documentary Messiah at the Foundling Hospital (sit tight, it’s an hour long).

I discovered more about Hogarth’s contributions. He designed the logo in the form of a coat of arms, which is, as the documentary’s narrator points out, quite brilliant. Because it’s a coat of arms, it would have had instant appeal for the well-heeled aristocrats who were being targeted as donors. But the legend is in English–just one word: Help.

Arms of the Foundling Hospital

Arms of the Foundling Hospital

To be honest I’m not sure who the figure on the left is–a sort of female corkscrew? Anyone know? On the right is Britannia. The rest is self-explanatory, the baby and the innocent lamb. Anyway, the point is that this worked. It became hip and fashionable to be a philanthropist.

foundlingsHogarth also designed the children’s uniforms, some of which are on display at The Foundling Museum in London. (Ignore the well-scrubbed angelic appearance of the children in this painting. The clothes are correct.)

One perspective I’ve never encountered before is what other, more fortunate, children thought of foundlings and orphans. Some families might have a young maid who was trained at the Foundling Hospital. foundling samplerOne can only hope that no impressionable child saw the dying and abandoned babies on the streets of London whose fate so moved Coram. Here’s a sampler made in 1825 by ten-year-old Mary Ann Quatermain.

But back to those uniforms. What happened to the clothes the children wore when they were admitted? Historian Alice Dolan tells us that:

In 1757, when the Hospital was overwhelmed by the clothing due to the large influx of children, the Hospital committee decided to sell the

‘old Raggs and useless things brought in with the Children of this Hospital’

because they were causing problems with ‘Vermin’.

After enquiries, the Hospital Committee decided to sell to the rag merchant Mrs Jones in Broad St Giles who would pay 28 shillings a stone for linen rags and 4 shillings 6 pence a stone for woollen rags. This was more than twice what her competitor Joseph Thompson offered for the linen and woollen rags.

Considering the thousands of children were admitted to the Hospital, this was a valuable form of income. It’s a reminder too, that nothing was discarded–vermin or not–if it could be sold or upcycled.

The exhibit Threads of Feeling, some of the fabric samples and tokens mothers handed in with their babies for later identification, showed a few years ago at the DeWitt Museum in Williamsburg. Both I and Diane, who blogged about it, visited. While I was poking around online I checked out future exhibits at the Foundling Museum, although I doubt I’ll get to any. Are you planning, or have you been to, anything inspiring at a museum recently?

I’m disgracefully late with my blog post today but we still have time to wish William Hogarth a happy birthday. I’m going to give you a few interesting facts about Hogarth who I find such a wonderful, sympathetic sort of person, well ahead of his time in some respects, an artist with a social conscience and sympathy for the underdog–for instance, he was an early proponent of the humane treatment of animals, possibly because he was brought up in Smithfield, London, which was the area where livestock were slaughtered.

Things I love about Hogarth:

  1. His house in Chiswick has just been restored and opened to the public yesterday. Another place to go to!
  2. He included his pug in his self portrait.
  3. He eloped to marry Jane Thornhill, daughter of the artist Sir James Thornhill (I found this online somewhere yesterday and now I can’t find it again. Possibly I made it up because I found it romantic).
  4. He was a party animal: cofounder of The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, a gentlemen’s club dedicated to the celebration of British beef and liberty, and the Rose and Crown Club, “a bawdy assembly of younger artists and cognoscenti,” who met to discuss art in a pub.
  5. When visiting France shortly after the tenuous Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle he was arrested and proved he was an artist and not an English spy by drawing some very rude cartoons of Frenchmen. Surprisingly he was released.
  6. He was a founder of the Foundling Hospital which I blogged about here along with some other interesting online sites, but do check out the heartbreaking Threads of Feeling exhibit, an online collection of scraps of fabric left with abandoned infants.

Here are a couple of Hogarth’s paintings I really like–his study of his servants and the amazing oil sketch The Shrimp Girl. Which of his paintings/engravings do you like? Any more fun facts about him?


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