This is A Choir of Orphan Girls, painted around 1900 by the Dutch artist Thérèse Schwartze (1851-1918) and now displayed at the Foundling Museum in London. The children in the painting were for a long time thought to be Dutch orphans, which wasn’t an entirely unreasonable starting point given the artist’s nationality and that she often painted girls from orphanages in the Netherlands. However, their clothes provided a rather important clue that brought the scene considerably closer to where I was standing, although I would probably have recorded that they were wearing hats, which perhaps explains why the identification work was left to someone else.
The bonnets, pinafores and collars edged with red were distinctive elements of the London Foundling Hospital’s uniform that the children wore, originally designed by William Hogarth. These details enabled the museum’s curators to identify the girls as children from the Hospital, giving the painting a direct connection with the institution that I was visiting. Schwartze regularly visited London and is known to have sketched Foundling children during some of her visits, with several studies now held in Dutch museums.
Knowing who the children were also gives the scene rather more significance, as singing helped draw visitors to the Hospital’s chapel and publicise its charitable work. The girls were participating in worship, but their performances also formed part of the institution’s public face, giving visitors the chance to hear the children whose care they might help to support. I rather like that the painting’s connection with London was there in plain sight, waiting for someone who understood what they were looking at. I took a photograph and admired the result, leaving the international clothing investigation to the professionals.