Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum
in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore
(1692-1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is
now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore's small oil
painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most
shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The
painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress
strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi
gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards
the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned
infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the
most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story - certainly
a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction.
But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it
would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph
Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for
almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even
so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship
associated with Hogarth and the `modern moral subject' of the 1730s
and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until
now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while
encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi
cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set
this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist's life
and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This
will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore's
portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The
Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale
`conversations' The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family,
juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the
Foundling Museum's Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore's `Pamela'
series, inspired by Samuel Richardson's bestselling novel.
Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues
around the status and care of women and children, master/servant
relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.
General
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