The Borough of Camden is home to many museums and galleries, the most well known probably being the British Museum located in Bloomsbury. But Camden is also home to many smaller and more unusual museums including the Foundling Museum.
Also located in Bloomsbury, the museum is housed in what was once offices for the Foundling Hospital, a children’s home founded by retired sea Captain Thomas Coram. Not only does the museum tell the history of the Foundling Hospital and its people in a mixture of both heart-breaking and heart-warming stories, it is also filled with a fabulous collection of art. In fact, the hospital with its original picture gallery in the West Wing, effectively became England’s first gallery.
Which brings me on to the subject of one of the Foundling Hospital’s original Governors, so drum roll please for one of the most famous and satirical artists of the 18th century, William Hogarth.
William Hogarth was born in 1697 in Bartholomew Close in the City of London, near to the current site of Smithfield’s Meat Market. He was from a lower middle-class family and his father Richard was a schoolteacher of Latin and a Classicist textbook writer. It was Richard’s passion for Latin and Greek language that led him to open a Latin Speaking Coffee House at St John’s Gate, in Clerkenwell.
Unfortunately it didn’t do very well, and subsequent bankruptcy landed him in debtors’ prison for five years, just like the father of Bloomsbury resident and also a supporter of the Foundling Hospital, Charles Dickens, although Dickens’ father’s incarceration was later in the 19th century.
Whilst the Hogarth family were living within the ‘Rules of the Fleet’ (prison lodgings outside of the prison walls where prisoners and their families could be together), William’s mother Anne made children’s ointment to help make ends meet financially.
Although Hogarth never spoke of his father’s imprisonment, he would have known what it was like to be poor and it is believed this would later be reflected in his style of art and also his charity work.
Young William was apprenticed as a silver-plate engraver, although he didn’t finish it but joined one of the artists’ schools in St Martin’s Lane, close to today’s Trafalgar Square and later Sir James Thornhill’s (he of the Painted Hall, Greenwich/dome of St Paul’s Cathedral) Free Academy in close-by Covent Garden. This would lead to him meeting his wife Jane, who was Thornhill’s daughter, and in fact the pair eloped. The Thornhill’s wanted someone a bit wealthier for their daughter; however, they soon came round, as did Hogarth’s fortune.
Much of Hogarth’s work highlighted the moral and social issues of the day, poverty, prostitution, crime and debauchery, leading to his particular style being termed ‘Modern Moral Subject’. His biggest break most probably came with A Harlot’s Progress, a series of six paintings making a cartoon-type story about a young woman from the country ensnared into a life of prostitution. This was later followed by A Rake’s Progress, this time a series of eight paintings focusing on a wealthy heir called Tom Rakewell and his life of women and drinking and gambling ultimately resulting in venereal disease in Bedlam Lunatic Asylum. Camden’s very own Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is usually home to the Rake’s Progress paintings although at the moment they are on loan to the current Hogarth Exhibition at Tate Britain. Like much of his work. these paintings were reproduced by Hogarth as prints, making them more affordable for ordinary people, as well as increasing his profits. However, it meant that pirate copies were also being produced, something which greatly and quite rightly infuriated him.
The wealthy Hogarth was a very active Governor of the Foundling Hospital. As well as personal donations and fundraising, he and his wife Jane, who were childless, often fostered children from the hospital, who would have been given the name of Hogarth.
As I said earlier, the Hospital was also a gallery where prospective financial supporters could be entertained, and Hogarth not only donated his own works but encouraged his artistic friends to do the same.
‘Killing two birds with one stone’, artists would be able to display their work to prospective clients, whilst those same clients would be romanced by their surroundings into donating funding to the hospital. The more funding the hospital had, the more children they could help.
Works donated by Hogarth included an almost full size realistic painting of the hospital’s founder Thomas Coram, a satirical painting The March of the Guards to Finchley, and biblical painting Moses brought before the Pharaoh’s daughter.
He also designed the hospital’s Coat of Arms and it is believed that he also designed the children’s uniforms.
The March of the Guards to Finchley is a painting about the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion led by the Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie in an attempt to seize power from Protestant King George II. The troops are mustering at Tottenham Court Turnpike (near today’s Euston Road) to march north to Finchley, with typical Hogarth satire including a bawdy house and drunken soldiers. The painting failed to impress King George II, for whom it was originally painted, so Hogarth offered it in a lottery. 2,000 tickets were put up for sale with 157 unsold tickets being given to the Foundling Hospital. Guess what — the Foundling Hospital won! This meant that not only did they get to keep the painting, where it still lives today (although also on loan at the moment), the publicity of the lottery led to potential supporters wanting to visit the hospital to see it.
The Moses painting shows a distressed-looking child (Moses) being handed to his adoptive mother, the Pharaoh’s daughter, by his wet nurse who is struggling to hold back tears , as she is in fact the child’s birth mother who had hidden him in the bulrushes to save him from being killed. The significance of this painting is of course that Moses is often thought of as the original ‘foundling’. Also, babies taken into the hospital were at first sent away to be wet-nursed and would bond with these ladies, causing heartache when it was time to leave them; sometimes, but by no means always, they would be returned to their birth mother via a token system. Tokens were mementos left by the birth mother to prove identity if they wanted to claim the child back if her circumstances had improved. They could be anything from a piece of fabric or paper to a coin or piece of jewellery and many of these little treasures are on display inside the museum. If you look down at the pavement by the Brunswick centre in nearby Marchmont Street, you will see an art installation depicting some of theses tokens embedded into the floor.
As well as a generous philanthropist, Hogarth was also an animal lover, often depicted with his pet dog, a pug called Trump (see photograph above). Again he used art to show what he thought about animal abuse in another series of prints called The Four Stages of Cruelty.
In print 1 a number of boys including one called Tom Nero are torturing cats and dogs. In print 2 Tom Nero is now an adult and, I’m very sad to say, is portrayed as a Hackney Coachman beating his injured horse. In print 3 Tom Nero is now depicted as a robber and murderer of a women. Finally in print 4 He gets his comeuppance, lying dead on the table after his hanging where he is being disembowelled by a group of scientists.
Of course I couldn’t finish this blog without mentioning one of his most famous works, Gin Lane which is actually one of a pair, the other being Beer Street.
Gin Lane represents all that is bad and highlights the problems of the time known as the Gin Craze. Set in the notorious slum of St Giles, yep also in Camden, in the centre is a women so drunk on gin she doesn’t notice she has dropped her baby over the stairs. Beer Street, on the other hand, is portrayed as all that is good and depicts workers relaxing with a good old-fashioned pint at the end of a hard day’s graft.
So what’s your tipple? I’m afraid its the dreaded gin for me, although not when I’m driving of course. Cheers!
References
Foundling Museum: an introduction by Caro Howell
Hogarth’s House (guidebook) Scala publishers
William Hogarth Wikipedia
Image at top of page is of the Foundling Museum, (c) Paula Pickin, 2021