Exhibition & Galleries

Past Exhibitions

The Secret Staircase

Tuesday 8 April - Saturday 14 June

A collaboration between artist Caroline Isgar and writer Michele Roberts inspired by the tokens at the Museum, exploring the abandonment, loss and grief felt by an adult daughter as her mother goes through the process of dying.

The resulting artists' book includes a sequence of rewritten nursery rhymes, and a woodcut block inspired by the tables from the refectory of the Foundling Hospital. The book was exhibited with the wood block, the original artwork and the text.

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Where I Live: A collection of art by children around the world.

Thursday 27 March - Thursday 3 April

The children have taken pictures no visitor could get, because their subjects are themselves, their families and their friends.  The results have an intimacy, familiarity and humour that give real insights into their lives.

Artworks in this exhibition are for sale.

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Thursday 6 - Saturday 22 March 2008

This is the second year that the Foundling Museum is showing a selection of works submitted through the Flourish programme.  This exhibition celebrates the creative output of young people who have been in care; a showcase for young artists to express themselves and challenge preconceptions of the care system.

Flourish is not a competition but aims to encourage artists to partake in creative activities and challenge the mindset that prevents them from doing so.  All of the artists included in this exhibition have been cared for in some way; some are cared for by grandparents, some are residents of care homes, some have been young offenders and some have foster carers or are adopted.  The works displayed vary in subject matter and medium and the age of artists represented range from 6 to 26 years old.

The initiative started in 2006 as a one-off exhibition and has grown to incorporate a board of artists, including those involved in the first show to select pieces for this exhibition.  Flourish 2006 was the first national exhibition to include works by young people with such a diverce experience of care and has continued to champion their works and inspire creativity and emotional responses to the issues dealt with through these collections of works.  It is therefore fitting that the Foundling Museum is the venue for this exhibition, continuing in its tradition as the first public showcase for art in Britain, established to raise awareness of children in care through creative endeavour.

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Handel and the Crystal Palace

23 November 2007 - 2 March 2008

This exhibition explores the development of the Handel Festivals at the Crystal Palace in the nineteenth century and the major role they played in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Britain.

Handel was the first composer in Britain to be celebrated with major commemorative concerts, first in 1784 (believed to be the centenary of his birth) and again in 1834.  In the 1850s preparations were made for a celebration to mark 100 years since Handel’s death in 1759.  The opening of the Crystal Palace as a major cultural venue in the same decade provided an opportunity for Victorian Britain to celebrate their adopted composer on a grander scale than had been possible in the past, and also marked the start of a Handel Festival tradition which was to last well into the twentieth century.

The Crystal Palace was originally built for the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’. Six million people visited the exhibition – equivalent to about a third of the population of Britain at the time – and its image and reputation were well-known from contemporary publications. The building in Hyde Park was later moved and re-erected in a greatly enlarged form at Sydenham in south London, in an area that was renamed Crystal Palace; it was eventually destroyed by fire in 1936.

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Foundling Tales

20 November to 31 December 2007 in the Coram Cafe and online gallery

The poet Subhadassi was The Foundling Museum’s writer-in-residence throughout September – November 2007. He took stories from the museum as a starting point for his own writing, and used them to inspire local students and residents to create their own unique work, combining text, photography and performance.

Click on the links below to see a selection of work by Subhadassi, students at Westminster Kingsway College and La Sainte Union School, and young people from Somers Town involved with the project Scene and Heard.

Foundling Tales is part of the Arrivals programme – a major events programme celebrating the opening of St Pancras International and the arrival of the first Eurostar. The project was managed by literature consultancy UrbanWords.

Subhadassi’s Commissioned Poem

Text and Images from Westminster Kingsway College

Poetry from La Sainte Union School

Haikus from Scene and Heard

Thanks

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RSVP:  Contemporary artists at the Foundling

September - November 2007

Fifteen contemporary artists from the East of England have been invited to create works inspired by the art and social history collections at London’s Foundling Museum. Their responses – including a cascade of kinetic sculpture, a wallpaper of children’s names, and a lollipop opera based on Handel’s Foundling Anthem - will be on show in a seven-week exhibition and programme of public events this Autumn at the Foundling.

The RSVP artists are Matt Cook, Tom Cox-Bisham, Lorrice Douglas, Sandra Flower, David Kefford, Simon Liddiment, Nicola Naismith, Alex Pearl, Emily Russell and Kristian De La Riva, Sarah Sabin, Rob Smith, Townley and Bradby, and Zory - Farngis Shahrokhi.

They are all participants on Arts Council England East’s Escalator Visual Arts programme, initiated and developed by Commissions East. Commissions East has a track record of commissioning contemporary art in historic locations, most recently at Wymondham Abbey, Felbrigg Hall, Orford Ness, and Dunstable Downs. “The collaboration enables artists based in the East of England to work with an internationally renowned venue,” says David Wright, Director. “A previous project, Stay, in 2005 at the Great Eastern Hotel, London, involved eleven artists, such as Susan Gunn, and Richard DeDomenici, who successfully used the opportunity as a springboard for their careers.”

RSVP will be the first major contemporary art show at the Foundling Museum, continuing the tradition begun by Hogarth to encourage emerging contemporary artists to submit their work for display. Gainsborough, himself from the East Anglian town of Sudbury, produced his first well-known work The Charterhouse (1748) for the original Foundling exhibition at the age of 21. Now, nearly two centuries later, we are once again bringing new artists to public attention.

Throughout the exhibition there will be opportunities to engage with the artists and their work.  Please see our events pages for further details.

Gill Hedley, previously Director of the Contemporary Art Society, is curating the exhibition, and leading some of the tours. “I have long been fascinated by the Foundling story, not least because artists at the time the Foundling Hospital was set up – such as Hogarth and Gainsborough - supported the charity as well as cleverly creating a platform for their own works of art. It's a real pleasure for me to work with these contemporary artists to stage an exhibition which will respond in a variety of ways to the fascinating history and collections of the Foundling Museum.”

Rhian Harris, Director of the Museum, sees the new works as “a powerful, contemporary counterpoint to the Foundling’s historic interiors. They will bring a new audience to the Museum, who will be both excited by the exhibition and moved by the stories of the Foundling children and the people who came to their aid.”

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Foundling Lives

July – September 2007

An exhibition focussing on the lives of four foundlings, each from a different era, providing an inside glimpse into the lives of the children cared for by the Hospital.  Through photographs, film footage, artifacts and personal memories, the exhibition showed how the Hospital and attitudes about child care have changed over the centuries.

Two eighteenth-century children came to life in the exhibition.  The first was Paul Holton who became a successful business man and community leader and the second was Mercy Draper, a blind girl, who went on to become a successful singer before being committed to a lunatic asylum. 

They were followed by John Brownlow, a nineteenth-century child, believed to be the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ “kindly Mr Brownlow” in Oliver Twist.  He was used as a focus for exploring Dickens’ relationship with the Foundling Hospital and the exhibition features some never-before publicly shown Dickens memorabilia.  The final child of the four, Joe Ormiston came from the end of Hospital’s institutional life bringing the exhibition into living memory with an at-times difficult and heart-rending personal story.

The exhibition concluded with a look at the twenty-first century and the work of the children’s charity Coram which continues the Foundling Hospital’s groundbreaking work with vulnerable children and young people.

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Hogarth's Children

March - July 2007

William Hogarth is most frequently associated with incisive social satire as seen in works such as his Rakes Progress, and his devotion to the Foundling Hospital may seem surprising. This exhibition examined the little known charitable aspect of Hogarth's character.

Hogarth was involved as a Governor of the Foundling Hospital from the beginning. He served as an active member of the Court of Governors as well as of the General Committee. He supported the Hospital by designing the children's uniforms and the Foundling Hospital seal, acting as a foster parent for foundlings and even volunteering to inspect the conditions of the homes of wetnurses hired by the institution.

Hogarth's Children provided further insight into the motivations and passions of a dynamic and remarkable man and the catalogue can still be purchased from the Museum Gift Shop.

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Guercino: St Francis recovered

November 2006 - January 2007

This was a rare opportunity to view the recently recovered Guercino painting of Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata, which was stolen from a church in Italy in 1973 and found 25 years later in Switzerland.

The painting, which had never been on display before in this country, was exhibited together with drawings and the documents relating to its finding and extensive restoration.

A limited number of copies of the beautiful and fully-illustrated catalogue for this exhibition are available for sale in the Museum Gift Shop.

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12 minutes of black and white

October 2006 - November 2006

An exhibition of photographs by Peter Lamb in the Coram Café.

Peter Lamb’s 12 minutes of black and white comprises a dozen images from around the world, twelve moments in life.

The work is the culmination of a project exploring the aesthetic spectrum of one camera and one lens (a Leica M6 Rangefinder and a 50 mm Summicron). (Above image © Peter Lamb)

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Handel's 'Giulio Cesare': From Egypt to England

May 2006 - October 2006

In 1724 when Handel staged ‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’, he presented the London audiences with a portrayal of the Roman dictator quite different to the familiar historical, Shakespearean figure.  The original libretto on which the opera is based is a light-hearted affair, written for the Venice carnival season in 1676:  the details of the plot, which focuses on the love affair between Caesar and Cleopatra, are largely fictional.

Handel’s score added depth to the characters, creating a more dramatic work and some of his most challenging roles, for which he enrolled a star studded cast providing them with some of his best known melodies, including ‘Piangerò’ and ‘Va tacito’.  

“Giulio Cesare in Egitto” was pivotal in the rediscovery of Handel’s operas in the 20th century.

 © Royal Opera House Collections

Numerous recent productions have gone from reconstruction of baroque staging, to dinosaurs in Munich, to the most recent Bollywood-style reading of the Glyndebourne production, which is to be revived at the 2006 Glyndebourne Festival.   The exhibition traces almost 300 years of Giulio Cesare’s performance history in England through documents and images and in its historical context.

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A Seven-day: Artists Book

November 2005 - February 2006

This exhibition, the first collaboration between the Slade School of Fine Art UCL and the Foundling Museum, examines the roles of the image and the written word, bringing together artist and writer through the medium of the artists' book. Artist Caroline Isgar worked with writer Jane Borodale and artist Eddie Farrell to collaborate on this project through their shared interest in the Foundling Hospital.

The project integrates Borodale's interest in both the concerns of eighteenth-century illegitimacy and the immediacy and brevity of the journal form, with Farrell's fascination with a worn brass plaque in a stretch of pavement marking a boundary of the original Foundling Hospital. The result, their Artists' Book, was launched at the Slade School of Fine Art prior to the exhibition at the Foundling Museum and further projects between the two institutions are anticipated.

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Invisible images

June 2005 – October 2005

Invisible images is an exhibition by artist-photographer Ted Duncan. Ted was brought up in care and also lived with various foster families during the 1970’s and early 1980’s. The exhibition is an emotional journey through Ted’s childhood memories and feelings of abandonment culminating in her acceptance of herself and her ‘inner’ child.

Invisible images is Ted’s family album of herself as an adult coming to terms with her childhood experiences – she has no family pictures of herself as a child and the exhibition represents her “family-less album”.

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Moses in the Bulrushes

November 2004 – January 2005

Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A. (1723-1792)

Oil on canvas, 69.8 x 90.2 cm
On loan to the Foundling Museum from Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts

The subject of Reynolds’s picture is taken from the Old Testament story of the infancy of Moses, as told in the Book of Exodus. Moses was used symbolically by both Hogarth and Hayman in their paintings as the first Foundling and to suggest the work of the Hospital – the saving of young lives. It is therefore an appropriate picture for the Foundling Museum’s first loan. This was only the second time this painting had been exhibited publicly, the previous was in 1884.