Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum has more than 275 years of history permeating its objects, stories, and spaces. It tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, which was established in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram, to care for babies at risk of abandonment.

The Foundling Hospital was the UK’s first children’s charity and became its first public art gallery. It was transformed into one of London’s most fashionable venues by the artist William Hogarth, who encouraged leading artists to donate their work and by the composer George Frideric Handel, who held annual benefit concerts of Messiah in its chapel.

Today the collection includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, clocks and ceramics. Highlights range from tiny, touching identifying tokens left by mothers with their babies to composer George Frideric Handel’s Will. Artworks on display include work by outstanding contemporary artists like Yinka Shonibare, Tracey Emin and Michael Craig-Martin, as well as those made and donated nearly three centuries earlier by William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds.

Our Gerald Coke Handel Collection is a major research resource for study of the composer and philanthropist George Frideric Handel and his contemporaries. More than 14,000 items include manuscripts, printed music, books, artworks, sound recordings and ephemera.

During its two centuries in operation, the Foundling Hospital looked after a remarkable 25,000 children. The Museum opened in 2004, fifty years after the Foundling Hospital placed its last pupil in foster care. The Museum building is situated in the grounds of the old hospital at 40 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury (near to Russell Square tube station). It was constructed in the 1930s, and incorporates many architectural features from the original eighteenth-century hospital building.

Visit the Museum to discover the story of the Foundling Hospital, the children who lived there, and its vibrant community of artists, musicians and supporters through its galleries and historic rooms.