I thought that this painting at the Foundling Museum in London was rather moving. This is A Mother Depositing Her Child at the Foundling Hospital in Paris, painted around 1855 by Henry Nelson O’Neil (1817–1880). The mother has one hand against her face and the other resting beside the opening, with her baby in a basket beneath. I do wonder how long mothers would wait here, whether they wanted the process to be very quick or whether it was almost impossibly difficult to not linger.
The word ‘depositing’ in the artwork’s title seems a little transactional when describing a separation between a mother and her child. The Paris set-up was different to London, as the hatch shown here was never part of the admission system at the Foundling Hospital. After receiving its Royal Charter, the London institution’s Governors wrote to European hospitals, including the one in Paris, to learn about the practicalities of caring for foundlings.
The tokens elsewhere in the museum were left during actual admissions, whereas this is an artist’s depiction of a mother leaving her baby. I’m not sure if this set-up allowed for any potential return, but I can’t begin to imagine what the walk home would have felt like for a mother who had just left her child here.