The Foundling Museum opened in June 2004 in Bloomsbury on the site of the Foundling Hospital, London’s first home for abandoned children. Thanks to the connections of its founder, Thomas Coram, and governors, the artist William Hogarth and composer George Frideric Handel, the Hospital also became the first public art gallery, with artists donating works to support London’s fashionable new children’s charity.

The nationally important collections were hidden for decades and under

serious threat of dispersal. They went on public display for the first time last year after a seven-year appeal for funding. £7.4 million was raised through private donations, charitable trusts and foundations, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the HLF and the Art Fund.

The Museum, which has a full and part time staff of 14 and 75 volunteers, has been described as three museums in one. The Coram Children’s gallery tells the story of the Foundling Hospital and testifies, for the first time, to the lives of the 27,000 children cared for during its 200-year history. The exhibition is full of objects, images and oral testimonies from these children, such as the poignant tokems left by impoverished mothers in the hope that they might, one day, reclaim their children.

The Hospital’s art collection is housed in rooms whose 18th-century interiors were rescued from the original Hospital and includes the magnificent Court Room, considered to be one of the finest examples of a Rococo interior in London. The works of art include Hogarth’s iconic portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, his infamous modern moral history The March of the Guards to Finchley as well as works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, Hudson, Highmore, Highman, Rysbrack and Roubiliac.

The Gerald Coke Handel Collection on the second floor, an appropriate home in view of the composer’s long association with the Foundling Hospital, contains manuscripts, printed scores, art works, memorabilia and literature relating to the life, work and legacy of Handel. Visitors can listen to his music in specially designed “musical chairs” and there are study facilities for scholars and researchers using the collection.

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