Case study | Lighting the Foundling Museum

The Foundling Museum, which is in the grounds of the old Foundling Hospital in London, incorporates many architectural details and features from the original 18th-century building. It explores the history of the UK’s first children’s charity and its transformation into the inaugural public art gallery, with the artist William Hogarth and composer George Frideric Handel playing major roles.

The museum required a flexible lighting system for its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions that offered versatility for changing shows, while remaining in keeping with the 18th-century design style of the building. The main goal was to ensure that the collection and the building were illuminated to the highest standard.

Decorative lighting and antique brass hardware have been replaced by a flexible system with track lighting and spotlighting. Custom finishes ensure that the new lighting melds with the existing interiors, allowing viewers to focus on the beauty of the artworks and historic spaces.

Halogen lights have been switched to energy-efficient LEDs. The Foundling was concerned about maintaining high-quality lighting, so the LEDs offer a high colour rendering index (CRI) of 97+, which ensures that the artworks will be rendered faithfully in comparison with a natural light source.

Updated lighting systems have also been added to two historic rooms that feature original interiors and allow visitors to gain an insight into life in the 1700s.

A particularly challenging space to light was the Court Room, with its decorative roccoco interior. The ornate plasterwork ceilings and eight roundel paintings inset into the wall meant there were very few locations to position lights – the existing brass lighting track and large gold picture lights stuck out against the white plasterwork ceiling.

Our solution was to install a special tray that sits above a door mantel to accommodate the TM Linear Wash, which is particularly well suited to illuminating expansive mural ceilings and walls within historic homes. It uplights the ornate ceiling and has positions to mount adjustable spotlights to accent the previously unlit roundels.

We have also replaced many of the replica heritage ceiling sconces that were installed across the Foundling Museum in the early 2000s, which allows greater flexibility for lighting throughout the building and has facilitated repurposing some previously unused spaces to useful hanging spaces. All art lights use a CRI of 98+ to ensure that the artworks remain as vivid as they are.

The inspiration for the lighting systems came from the heritage aesthetic of the museum and its artworks.

Andrew Molyneux and Harry Triggs are the founders of TM Lighting