Guardian: A forgotten London charity shares its Georgian treasures

A forgotten London charity shares its Georgian treasures

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Saturday May 8, 2004
The Guardian

A new museum opens in London next month, filled with one of the best
and least known art collections in the country - and saddled with a
financial challenge that dwarfs the woes of any existing arts centre.

A legal problem means that although the £4.2m cost of creating the
Foundling Museum has been raised, the museum owns neither its home,
nor the collection, which includes works by Hogarth, Gainsborough,
Reynolds, and original scores given by George Frederick Handel.

Over the next 25 years of its lease, the museum will have to try to
raise funds to buy the collection, and renew the lease, together
estimated at up to £30m, from the Coram Family charity.

"Sometimes it does seem utterly daunting," said the curator, Rhian
Harris. "But when you think of the outcome of creating this museum,
and the alternative of having this wonderful collection scattered, it
has to be the right thing to do."

The collection is that of the Foundling Hospital, the first home for
abandoned babies, which also became London's first public art gallery
through its patron, William Hogarth.

Although the children's home closed 50 years ago, the charity
continues as the Coram Family. But its plans to show off its
extraordinary collection and remarkable history almost collapsed when
the former solicitor general Ross Cranston gave his opinion that
maintaining an art collection was in conflict with its aims as a
charity.

Had it led to a legal challenge, it could have forced the sale of the
collection - and obliged every other charity in the country to sell
its works of art.

Instead, the collection and the charity have been split; the charity
has leased the building, and loaned the collection to the museum,
which must raise funds to acquire both.

The Foundling Hospital began when Captain Thomas Coram returned to
London from a career at sea, and stepped over an abandoned baby in a
gutter.

He badgered every wealthy friend and bombarded George II with appeals.
The king finally granted a royal charter in 1739, and the hospital
opened in 1745, in Bloomsbury, then on the outskirts of London.

Hogarth designed the emblem for the hospital and the red and black
uniform for the foundlings, gave it two major paintings, and possibly
fixed the raffle so that the hospital won a third, his satirical
masterpiece The March of the Guards to Finchley.

Handel wrote the hospital anthem, gave annual charity performances,
and left autographed manuscripts of the Messiah and the keyboard on
which he first performed it. And the young Gainsborough gave the
hospital his first known work in London.

· The Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London, opens on June 15.
Tel: 020 7841 3600

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