The Foundling Hospital

The Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London

Yesterday I finally got around to visiting the Foundling Museum. This has been on my list of places to visit for a long time and I expected to be very moved by the story it had to tell.

The Foundling Hospital owed its existence to the persistence and energy of Thomas Coram. Captain Coram was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset and he spent a lot of his early years at sea and in the American Colonies. Back in London in the 1720s he was shocked to discover how many babies were abandoned and left to live and, more often than not, die on the streets.

Thomas Coram

He began to campaign tirelessly to set up an institution where children such as these could be cared for. Since he did not have any wealthy or aristocratic connections it took him about 17 years to gain enough support and signatures to petition the monarch and in October 1739 he obtained a royal charter from George II. Thomas Coram must have been a very driven man to keep going over all those years. I do wonder how many front doors he had to knock on, gates to open and close and steps to climb, how much of London he trudged around and how many people he had to convince that this was a good idea.

When a baby was accepted for admission a token was included by the parent so that in the event they were able to reclaim their offspring the connection with the child could be proved. These were often marked coins, trinkets, pieces of fabric or verses written on scraps of paper and some of these tokens are on display in the museum. Then the baby was renamed, baptised and shipped out to a foster home in the countryside where they would live until they were about five years old before being returned to live at the hospital. If they survived into their mid-teens they would be educated into a trade or sent into domestic service. Job done. The regime seemed fairly brutal by today's standards but it was actually quite enlightened for the time.

Coram must have eventually come to know wealthy and influential people because William Hogarth the artist was one of the first governors of the hospital and the composer George Frederic Handel also became an important benefactor. In addition to caring for over 25,000 children over several centuries the hospital also developed an important art collection and established the link between art, music and charity which continues to this day. I imagine that contemporary events like Children in Need on television are descendants of Handel's Foundling Hospital Anthem.

The Foundling Hospital's original buildings were demolished in the 1920s and part of the site is now a children's play area called Coram's Fields where adults are not allowed unless accompanied by a child. The original charity continues its work with children under the name of Coram and so the captain's legacy still lives on.

Dayanita Singh: Go away closer

Dayanita Singh is an artist who works with photography. Her exhibition Go Away Closer is on at the Hayward Gallery until 15 December. Thanks to my husband's passion for photography I'm beginning to be able to discern a well thought out photograph from an idle snap taken on a phone camera but it's been a long time coming.

Similarly I find listening to music difficult because it feels like a foreign language that I don't understand and I'm unsure how to respond. Dayanita refers to music in the exhibition notes saying that she 'understood that music, with its pauses and silences, has lessons for photography'.

Dayanita is a natural storyteller and uses her photography to form books as a way of engaging with the viewer. For her, photography is a language and the images are texts. The smallest exhibit in the show is a concertinaed structure with a photograph on each face and the exhibition notes echo this design as a folded out leaflet rather than a small booklet stapled at the spine.

While I found the unconventional arrangement of the photographs challenging to look at (if you change the order in which they appear you simultaneously change their meaning) I did respond to the way she works in series because I like to do that myself.

Dayanita clearly thinks rather differently about the world from many of us because she is creating her own Museums to display her work. Unlike the vast cathedrals to science, art and the natural world I am used to visiting in Kensington these museums are large wooden structures like movable book cases which can be transported around the world and then put on display. These allow her to choose endlessly different arrangements of her pictures and in this way her work can 'keep on growing or changing.'

I imagine that you could visit this exhibition over and over again and it would be different every time. I think there were roughly six of these museums on display when we visited. They included images along with empty shelves causing me to wonder what might be in them if I came back the next day.

Living in London we are bombarded with photographs at every turn. They are on the tube, on the bus, on billboards, inside shops and also everywhere on the internet to the extent that I find I'm protecting myself from the endless stream of photographic images which invades my daily life. This exhibition helped me see photography in a different light, to engage with it and revel in the stories the images revealed which was both refreshing and a delight.

Catherine the not-so-great

Today was the first meeting of the year of the Freelance Media Group. We meet at the Groucho Club, the private hang out of the Very Important People who inhabit Media Land. Sometimes you'll spot a celebrity or two which is all good fun but you must not, whatever you do, engage them in conversation.

Anyway there is fat chance of that happening since we meet in a room up several flights of stairs away from all the schmoozing. Here I found myself sitting next to a journalist who revealed that she covers royal stories and she politely agreed when I pointlessly gushed 'Ooh, you'll be busy when the baby arrives.' Then I asked her what she thought of the Duchess of Cambridge's new portrait by Paul Emsley on display at the National Portrait Gallery which in the last few days has been subjected to a barrage of criticism. She assured me that it looks much better 'in the flesh' than it did in the papers. So I decided to check it out for myself since we were just a short walk away from the gallery.

My first impression was that it is far too big. It is more-or-less 3ft x 4ft. I think it would have had more impact if it had been half that size. I imagine it could be quite terrifying receiving a commission to paint a royal portrait and maybe that is why Catherine has ended up looking a bit lifeless. I much preferred the portrait further along the corridor of Mo Mowlam (a British MP and Labour minister) painted by John Keane in 2001. This portrait is full of life, you can see the brush strokes and although Mo Mowlam is in repose you can get a sense of her vitality. Poor Catherine by contrast doesn't appear to have any vitality. However if you turn your head slightly you can see her engagement photos hanging in a neighbouring gallery where you can see that she is clearly a very lively young woman.

This is just the first official portrait of Catherine and no doubt in time we will be able to chart the progress of her royal life in future portraits in the same way we can with Her Majesty the Queen who appears to have sat for more portraits than some of us have had hot dinners - let's hope they might have a bit more life in them.