LONDON.- The National Gallery today (18 March 2025) unveiled a wealth of new digital experiences, created and enhanced to celebrate the Gallery’s Bicentenary.
200 Paintings for 200 Years, National Gallery Imaginarium, and a new iteration of The Keeper of Paintings, now augmenting the reality of the Roden Centre for Creative Learning, mark the Gallery’s commitment to consistently driving innovation through digital technology. Each one has involved extensive collaboration with experts across a wide set of artistic fields.
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National Gallery Imaginarium
The National Gallery has created a world that takes inspiration from the physical Gallery settings and broadens out to a more expanded place – our visitors’ imaginations. National Gallery Imaginarium is a new digital art experience for a worldwide audience that puts visitors in dialogue with great paintings. Visitors will be prompted to step inside this new digital room to get closer than ever before to some of your favourite paintings, to imagine the painting’s world and the artist’s inspirations and offers the opportunity to see how other visitors have interpreted the same work. The experience is designed to function either as a solo experience, or as the catalyst for conversations between families, friends, or teachers.
“It’s important for the Gallery to deepen the engagement with the paintings that our remote visitors can experience”, says John Stack, Director of Digital Innovation and Technology at the National Gallery. “We know that slow looking has great benefits for deeper insights, emotional connections, and mindfulness and wellbeing. So, it makes perfect sense to us to use new technologies to bring that experience to visitors that can’t spend all the time they would like to with our paintings in person, to spark their imagination and inspire new perspectives.”
National Gallery Imaginarium has been developed with strategic design agency Fabrique and digital product studio Q42, both part of Eidra. It also features a bespoke introduction from poet and novelist Sir Ben Okri, a newly commissioned soundscape from sound artist Nick Ryan.
200 Paintings for 200 Years
For the first time, the Gallery is making freely available 200 paintings’ catalogue entries, totalling 2.2million words of academic research, combining information already held (but only available on request or in select publications) with new findings brought to light with recent re-examination.
With these catalogue entries, we are sharing 2,700 images, including 75 x-rays, 155 infrared images and over 250 photomicrographs. We are also presenting information on the frames surrounding these same 200 paintings, the earliest of which dates to the 13th century, which has not been previously available to the public.
These technical and in-depth essays showcase everything we know about our paintings. They discuss in detail the subject matter, authorship, provenance and art historical significance of the works. New information based on the re-examination of each picture is combined with technical photographs.
New scholarship presented as part of 200 Paintings for 200 Years includes research on Raphael (1483 – 1520)'s Portrait of Pope Julius II (1511), one of the 38 paintings first purchased by the Government that marked the foundation of a National Gallery in 1824. For the first time, we have now been able to reconstruct and show what previous imaging processes had suggested the painting’s original background would have looked like.
Christine Riding, Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery, said: “The National Gallery has enjoyed a long and esteemed reputation as a leading centre for research. This aspect of our work has enabled us, to enrich our understanding, to communicate with depth and authority, and to ensure that the paintings in our care are safe for generations to come. This project is a significant milestone in making freely accessible the wealth of information that we hold.”
As the Gallery looks to its third century, digital innovation is constantly being pursued as an enhancement to in-person experiences. The Keeper of Paintings, our augmented reality game for children and families, has just launched a fourth experience as part of our new Roden Centre for Creative Learning – now part of a character driven “extended universe” taking place both in the Gallery and off site.
The new iteration, co-created with children, is embedded throughout the building to enhance the physical experience. Throughout the Bicentenary year digital experiences have formed a cornerstone of engaging with the public, including the far-reaching success of 200 Creators that has contributed to the doubling of the Gallery’s digital reach over the year.
A digital visitor experience will be integrated at the heart of the new Sainsbury Wing entrance, due to open to the public on 10 May 2025, including a connected canvas of high-resolution screens that will bring the Gallery’s paintings and expert knowledge to the fore.
Digital storytelling and innovation have been a focus for development at the National Gallery over the last five years, which has been greatly enabled through the generous support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Gallery’s digital partner for NG200, marking our anniversary year. All these projects are united by a commitment to human-centred design and meeting our audiences where they are – whether they have experienced the Gallery before or are coming to us for the first time.
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