Summary: The first major publication dedicated to the important 18th-century British artist Joseph Highmore, whose works address themes ranging from love, friendship and motherhood, to abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder. His extraordinary painting The Angel of Mercy, the centrepiece of this book, is one of the most controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted figure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story – certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the ‘modern moral subject’ of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this significant British artist...

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