Michael Craig-Martin, Tricycle, 2016 © Michael Craig-Martin

In 2016 the Foundling Museum commissioned Michael Craig-Martin to make a new work in response to its story and Collection. Painted in his signature bold, graphic style, Tricycle reminds visitors of the thousands of children who passed through the Foundling Hospital, most of whom are only known through the anonymous traces they left behind – uniforms, identification tags, plates, cutlery and the small everyday objects their mothers left with them as tokens. Tricycle was originally displayed in the Picture Gallery between September 2016 and February 2017, offering a point of imaginative departure in a room dominated by portraits of the Hospital’s eighteenth-century governors, and notable for the lack of reference to the foundling children. The painting is now installed within the Museum at the top of the Hospital’s eighteenth-century oak staircase.