Mothers’ ruin

At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting of a mother and baby. At one time the ‘Angel of Mercy’ was sold as a greetings card by its owner, the Yale Center of British Art in Connecticut, presumably intended as something you might send your own mother or child. But take a second glance and you might well wonder who bought the card and who they might have sent it to.

In Joseph Highmore’s Georgian scene, a young, fashionably dressed woman is splayed across the canvas, her feet in delicate silk shoes, a tiny baby, naked, resting precariously on her lap. On her left cowers a veiled figure in grey, resolutely turned away from her; on her right, a huge figure in classical robes and wearing a pair of massive feathery wings offers a guiding hand, pointing towards the buildings in the background which are meant to represent the Foundling Hospital, established in London in 1739. Closer study reveals that the delicate pink ribbon stretched between the woman’s hands is poised around the baby’s neck; a tiny pink brushstroke indicates the baby’s tongue, gasping for breath.

It becomes clear that this is not a typical virginal scene. The woman has been stopped in the nick of time from strangling her baby to death. But her fashionable silks, her desperate expression, the hooded, cowering figure all suggest the baby is the consequence of rape, not wanton sex, and the woman has been abused, ruined and now abandoned, possibly by the very people who are now looking at the painting. Her baby just-born, perhaps on that very spot, arrives not in a comfortable bed but in a dark cavern, outwith the safe domestic space.