Value judgement

For someone best known for popping up all over the UK as one of the experts on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, Lars Tharp is now firmly tied to one place – the Foundling Museum in central London.

Tharp joined as its director in October 2008 following the departure of Rhian Harris to the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. This is his first museum job, although his relationship with the Foundling goes back some time.

The museum opened in 2004 to tell the story of the Foundling Hospital, which was set up in the mid-18th century to care for abandoned children.

The museum is driven by the themes of philanthropy, art and music embodied in three of the hospital’s founders: the philanthropist Thomas Coram, the composer George Frideric Handel and the painter William Hogarth.

In addition to the artefacts relating to the children, the Foundling also includes a range of artworks given to support the hospital in its early days as well as the Gerald Coke Handel Collection.

Tharp is a music lover and plays the cello himself. He is also an admirer of Coram, whom he describes as “an extraordinary man who was a genuine philanthropist, with no self-interest at all”.

But Tharp’s real passion is for Hogarth, who is the reason he became involved with the museum in the first place. As a ceramics historian, he constantly used Hogarth prints and paintings for reference because many of the works include detailed images of ceramics.

“Rhian was the curator when I approached her in 1997 to borrow a punch bowl owned by Hogarth for a little exhibition commemorating his 300th birthday,” says Tharp.

“She consented and that’s what brought me in. Rhian and I became members of a group that we set up called the Hogarth group, which was a very informal association of like-minded Hogarth nuts.

"I got to know her better, and as she and her colleagues created this museum I got more and more drawn in. I thought it was a wonderful place.”

Tharp says when he heard that Harris was moving to the Museum of Childhood, he hadn’t really been thinking of a museum career, but the lure of Hogarth combined with the remarkable story the museum tells was irresistible.

His involvement in ceramics started after he left the University of Cambridge with a degree in archaeology but few prospects of a job. “There weren’t many archaeological jobs going so I started thinking: ‘What is Plan B?’”

An interest in the material culture of China, sparked by eminent Cambridge Sinologist Joseph Needham, led Tharp to go for a job at an auction house.

“With a great deal of luck I got an interview at Sotheby’s and three days later the phone rang and they said come back and speak to their senior director, Julian Thompson, who was the great god of Chinese porcelain. They offered me a job and said they’d like to train me as an apprentice for two years and specialise in Chinese ceramics.”

He spent 16 years at Sotheby’s and had a wonderful time. Highlights included the multimillion pound sale of the Edward Chow collection.

“I got to handle every single piece, and not just once,” says Tharp. “I was a very sad lad and went in on Sundays with my camera and took every possible angle. I did not have a wife and family at that stage.”

His time at Sotheby’s has resulted in a lifelong love of ceramics, which he believes need to be handled to really understand them.

“You can give a piece of porcelain to a really good Chinese specialist and ask them to shut their eyes and just feel it and they can get quite close [to its origins]. I would always say if you are interested in a material object, you really should handle it.”

Tharp’s role at Sotheby’s also allowed him to work with museums, but his interest in them goes back much further to when he was growing up in Denmark in the 1950s.

He moved to England to be educated, but not before he had made a good many trips to the national museum in Copenhagen, where his grandfather was the keeper of antiquities.

“I have been involved in museums as a user since I was a wee baby being dragged round the national museum in Copenhagen by my grandfather,” Tharp says.

“And now I always drag my own family into them. I remember the outcry from the back seat when I saw a brown sign that said Bakelite Museum. I said: ‘OK, we’re going.’ My girls could not believe it, but it was fantastic, like walking into an Avengers’ set 1969. The most spooky thing was a Bakelite coffin.”

With his experiences behind the scenes and as a visitor, Tharp says there have been no real surprises since he started at the Foundling, although he is enjoying being part of a team again.

“I did 16 years at Sotheby’s and then 16 years as a one-man band, essentially, so this is me coming back into a corporate situation and it is a refreshing change. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to and it is great to do things that you couldn’t do on your own.”

Material culture

One person Tharp is working with is history professor John Styles, who is helping the museum develop an exhibition based on the pieces of material that were taken from the clothes of mothers who left children at the Foundling Hospital.

The material was attached to the record of the child and acted as a way of identifying the woman, as she would retain the matching piece. The exhibition will be called Material Witness and will open in October.

“There are at least 6,000 pieces of fabric representing these women,” says Tharp. “Those fragments are still attached to the billets so we know who they were from and the names of the children. I think it could become a fantastic exhibition.”

The museum’s collection lends itself to powerful and emotive stories about the history of the hospital and the people it helped. The items that many visitors find most affecting are the love tokens that women left when they gave their babies to the Foundling. Many of them are on display in the permanent exhibition and Tharp says they represent the heart of the story.

But he also hopes that the story can be told in other ways, particularly through contemporary art exhibitions. He was involved in a show that opened last month displaying the work of Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin and Paula Rego (until 9 May). All the works relate to the hospital and some have been created especially for the Foundling exhibition.

“The only way to keep a museum alive is by exhibitions and this is where we keep coming back to these themes of philanthropy, art and music,” Tharp says. “The Paula Rego, Tracey Emin, Mat Collishaw show is very much coming out of the tradition of Hogarth and his contemporary artists.”

Foundling Fellows

Philanthropy, art and music also led to the creation of the museum’s Foundling Fellows. The first fellows (musician Damon Albarn, artist Richard Wentworth  and writer Jacqueline Wilson) were announced in 2007 and the museum is gearing up to announce the next three.

“It is an award that carries an obligation as the fellows have to do something in the first year,” says Tharp.

“We will be building up a network of fellows; we are not going to drop them. Jacqueline Wilson is a case in point, as she delivered her event at an early stage but she keeps coming back to us. She mentions us in the press and has written us a novel, Hetty Feather.”

Despite his love of the museum, there are lots of things he thinks it can do better. He feels the story of the hospital in the 19th century is missing from the permanent exhibition and is working to change this.

He also believes better links need to be made to Coram, the foundation that still works to improve the lives of disadvantaged children. And he is working hard to build income from corporate hire, which fell by about 70 per cent last year.

All this has to be done on four and a half days a week, as Tharp uses the other half-day to keep up his interests in broadcasting, lecturing and taking cultural tours. But the museum even benefits from some of this.

Tharp says: “We did a spin off for the Antiques Roadshow called Priceless Antiques Roadshow and I made sure I was interviewed here. I spoke about the love tokens and how I felt that objects are powerful things but they need interpretation to take people into other worlds.”

This type of publicity can only help Tharp to get the museum better known so more people can find out about the extraordinary story of the Foundling Hospital.

Lars Tharp was born in Copenhagen in 1954, but was educated in England.

He studied archaeology at Cambridge before taking a job at auctioneer Sotheby’s, where he specialised in oriental ceramics. He left in 1993 to set up his own consultancy.

By this time he was a regular on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, having first joined the programme in 1985. As well as other broadcasting work, Tharp has also been involved in lecturing and taking cultural tours to China and the Baltic countries. He has also curated exhibitions, such as Hogarth’s China in 1997.

He joined the Foundling Museum in October 2008 as its director. He is one of this year’s Art Fund Prize judges.