Foundling Museum
The museum's façade, Brunswick Square. A statue of Thomas Coram is to the far right.
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 Location within Central London
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| Established | 2004 |
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| Location |
Brunswick Square London, WC1 United Kingdom |
| Coordinates | 51°31′31″N 0°07′18″W / 51.525278°N 0.121667°W |
| Type | Art gallery, Memorial |
| Visitors | c. 37,000 per year |
| Director | Caro Howell |
| Public transit access |
 Russell Square
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| Website | foundlingmuseum.org.uk |
The Foundling Museum in London tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, Britain's first home for abandoned children. The museum houses the nationally important Foundling Hospital Art Collection as well as the Gerald Coke Handel Collection, the world's greatest privately amassed collection of Handel memorabilia. After a major building refurbishment it reopened to the public in June 2004.
The museum examines the work of the Foundling Hospital's founder Thomas Coram, as well as the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel, both major benefactors of the institution. It also illustrates how the Foundling Hospital's charity work for children still carries on today through the child care organisation Coram. It is a member of The London Museums of Health & Medicine group.
In 1926, the hospital’s building in Bloomsbury was sold off, and the children moved to modern premises outside London. The Thomas Coram Foundation (now known as Coram) built a new headquarters in Brunswick Square, where works are displayed in historic interiors preserved from the original orphanage. The museum's building was refurbished in 2004.
The Foundling Museum was set up as a separate charitable organisation in 1998. Coram owns more than 100 paintings, probably worth more than £30 million. To safeguard the collection, a deal was agreed in 2002 under which Coram lent the pictures to the museum, allowing it to raise money to buy them over a 25-year period. In 2013, however, attorney general Dominic Grieve wrote to Coram stating that he is concerned that its "treatment of the museum … does not appear to fit with the spirit and intent of the arrangements put before the attorney general [in 2001]".
In 2012, it had 48,000 visitors.
The Foundling Hospital Collection includes works of art by Britain's most prominent eighteenth-century artists: William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Louis-Francois Roubiliac and many others like Emma Brownlow. These paintings and sculptures, often donated by the artists themselves, were given in order to support this Britain's first home for abandoned children. These works effectively made the Foundling Hospital the nation's first art gallery available to the public.
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Wikipedia