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.