[4] Artists such as William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel are central to the Hospital story and today the museum celebrates the ways in which creative people have helped improve children's lives for over 275 years.

After 17 years of tireless campaigning, Coram was finally granted a Royal charter by King George II, enabling him to set up the UK's first children's charity in Bloomsbury, London.

[2] To safeguard and display 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.

The Foundling Hospital Collection includes works of art by some of Britain's most prominent eighteenth-century artists: William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Louis-Francois Roubiliac and many others.

These paintings and sculptures, donated by the artists themselves, were given in order to support the Foundling Hospital and effectively made the institution the UK's first public art gallery.

This room is one of the best surviving Rococo interiors in London, with a magnificent plasterwork ceiling given as a gift to the hospital by plasterer William Wilton.

Visitors can learn about Handel's connection to the Foundling Hospital and see his Will he left behind, alongside manuscripts and printed scores, books, works of art, programmes and ephemera.