Celebrating a beloved author
Dame Jacqueline Wilson, DBE, FRSL (b.1945) is an award-winning children’s author and former Children’s Laureate. Her work concerns the many realities of childhood, both the joyous and painful – through her novels, Wilson explores themes of adoption, grief, and mental illness alongside friendship, first love, and growing up.
In 2008, Wilson became one of the Museum’s first Foundling Fellows. For her Fellowship, Wilson wrote her first historical novel, Hetty Feather, about a nineteenth-century foundling girl growing up in the Foundling Hospital. Now a series of eight books, a stage show, and a major CBBC TV production, Hetty has brought the Hospital’s historic story to life for new generations of children.
Saied Dai’s painting of Dame Jacqueline Wilson is the first commissioned portrait of a woman to enter the Foundling Museum Collection. This portrait, now hanging in the Museum’s Picture Gallery, represents an important landmark in the Foundling’s ongoing programme of commissioning and exhibiting contemporary art and continues the involvement of contemporary artists in the historic Founding Hospital’s historic story.
About the work, Dai says:
‘It is a privilege to be entering the fine art collection at the Foundling Museum and not without irony, in that both Dame Stephanie and I have come from backgrounds where we so easily could have been inhabitants of such an institution.’
About the artist
Saied Dai (b.1958) was born in Tehran. At the age of six, Dai and his sister travelled alone to England. Effectively abandoned by their parents, Dai attended a series of boarding schools, and was later raised by foster parents. He declined offers from medical schools to paint in Bournemouth, where he trained for seven years before entering the Royal Academy of Arts. Dai refers to himself as an abstract figurative painter, originally understanding art as a form of architecture and geometry. His practice demonstrates a formalism and reference to academic tradition, combined with modern, psychological perspectives. Collections containing portraits by Dai include the National Portrait Gallery and Balliol College, Oxford.
