The Foundling Museum was constructed in 1930s and is situated on the grounds of the old Foundling Hospital which, during its two centuries in operation (1739-1955), looked after a remarkable 25,000 children. It incorporates many architectural details and features from the original eighteenth-century hospital building. The museum explores the history of the UK’s first children’s charity and its transformation into the first public art gallery, with the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel playing major roles. The Royal Academy’s origins can also be traced to the artistic community at the Hospital during the eighteenth century.
The brief focused on the museum’s permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.
Currently, the collection includes work by outstanding contemporary artists like Yinka Shonibare, Tracey Emin and Michael Craig-Martin, and those made and donated nearly three centuries earlier by Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds.
The Foundling required a lighting system that offered maximum flexibility to a museum with a busy calendar of art programmes. TM Lighting was briefed to update the existing lighting systems to create more versatility for changing exhibitions, while keeping with the eighteenth century design style of the building. The main goal was to ensure that the lighting for the collection and the building itself was illuminated to the highest standard.
TM Lighting also updated the lighting in the Court Room and Committee Room, two of three ‘historic interiors’ within the museum. These are recreations of original interiors from the eighteenth-century building which allow visitors to gain insight into life at the time.
Overall vision
TM Lighting transformed the existing lighting system of the Foundling Museum to allow both the art and the architectural features to shine, while staying true to the heritage aesthetic of the space. TM Lighting designed a flexible lighting system, adding new track lighting and spotlighting to replace much of the decorative lighting and antique brass hardware throughout. Additionally, custom finishes were created to ensure that the new lighting melded seamlessly with the existing interiors. TM Lighting wanted to remain true to the architecture and minimise the appearance of modern interventions while providing functional lighting for the works of art on display.
The Court Room
The Court Room is one of London’s finest original Roccoco interiors with its magnificent plasterwork ceiling and works of art by leading eighteenth century British artists. This room was a particularly challenging space to light. With the ornate ceilings and eight roundel paintings inset into the wall, there were very few locations to position lights.
TM Lighting designed a special tray that sat above a door mantel to house the TM Linear Wash, a lighting solution particularly well-suited for illuminating expansive mural ceilings and walls within historic homes. The TM Linear Wash uplifted the ornate ceiling and had positions to mount ZeroThirtyOne spotlights according to where the light was required, to accent the eight significant roundels which line the wall of the space.
Before TM Lighting’s work on The Court Room, these roundels had never been lit. Now, they have been illuminated by TM Lighting’s minimal ZeroThirtyOne spotlights on adjustable-length stalks in a custom white finish. They merge seamlessly with the historic design of the room, disappearing into the white stucco features. The roundels depict significant hospitals (residential charities rather than medical institutions) including a representation of the Foundling Museum. Among them is a view of The Charterhouse by Thomas Gainsborough, which was painted when the artist was just 21 years old. TM Lighting was also commissioned separately by the Charterhouse to provide lighting for the Great Hall, more details can be found on their website here.
In the Court Room, the existing brass lighting track and large gold picture lights stood out against the white plasterwork ceiling.TM Lighting replaced these with their Classic Picture Light in a custom white finish to match the intricate plasterwork ceiling, ensuring the new lights melded seamlessly with the historic interiors. The design of the picture light works especially well in classical and historic buildings, with the depth of the hood offering lighting and glare control. It is suited to illuminating tall canvases in large open spaces like this one, ensuring an even spread of light over the full picture, with 97+ colour rendition (CRI) lighting.
The new lighting brings out the intricate detail of the original Rococo ceiling, which was preserved and transported piece by piece from the original site of the hospital when the original site was demolished in the 1920s. Made by Georgian master craftsman William Wilton in the 1740s, these examples of surviving Rococo plasterwork in Britain are rare in comparison to the Continent and Ireland, where the style was much more popular. As such, the Foundling Museum’s Court Room is particularly remarkable.
With TM Lighting’s careful planning, the room now maintains its original form with minimal intervention from modern lighting tools.
The Committee Room
In this space, TM Lighting attached a modified SlimLight Pro to a classic picture rail to accent the arworks in the room. The picture light hangs from the art rail rather than from a normal picture light arm that extends from behind the artwork. At points in the room, the SlimLight Pro completely disappears into the rail, replicating as closely as possible the viewing experience of the works in their original eighteenth-century home.
Many of the replica heritage ceiling sconces installed in the early 2000s were replaced with TM Lighting’s MainsTrack and ZeroSixty Spotlights, allowing greater flexibility for museum lighting throughout the building and repurposing some previously unused spaces to useful hanging spaces. All TM Lighting’s art lights use High Colour Rendition 98+CRI lighting to ensure that the artworks remain vivid in colour.
The inspiration came from the heritage aesthetic of the museum and its artworks. The Foundling Collections include paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, clocks and more.
The picture lights house advanced LED technology in an aesthetically traditional design, offering museum quality light for a space like the Foundling Museum. Both the picture lights and spotlights were then finished to match their surroundings, blending seamlessly into the background. The aim was to make the lighting disappear so that viewers could focus on the beauty of the artworks and historic space.
Many of the lights were meticulously concealed and seamlessly integrated within the museum’s spaces and features, ensuring they remained unobtrusive and did not interfere with the viewing of the artworks. This design enables viewers to form a deep and uninterrupted connection with each piece.
Energy efficiency is a key feature of TM Lighting products. When The Foundling switched from halogen lights to LEDs, they anticipated energy savings but were concerned about maintaining high-quality lighting. TM Lighting’s LEDs address this by offering a high CRI of 97+, which is not typical of most LEDs. This ensures that the artworks will be rendered faithfully in comparison with a natural light source.