LONDON.- The National Gallery’s collection displays can be seen in their entirety for the first time on a new tour on its website, thanks to a collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.
Opening all picture rooms of the Gallery to everyone online for the first time, the Google Arts & Culture tour captures the acclaimed 2024-25 Bicentenary redisplays of the whole collection, CC Land: The Wonder of Art.
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Prior to this new tour, its previous iteration – which has been a part of the National Gallery’s website since 2016 – has only shown the contents of eight rooms.
Now a much more extensive experience, you can either join a comprehensive tour of all the Gallery’s collection picture rooms – or you can try a highlights tour covering seven rooms, handpicked by our curators, to give a representative flavour of the in-person experience of the CC Land: The Wonder of Art collection displays and interpretation.
The highlights tour also focuses on specific paintings in each room, with links to more in-depth pages on each with gigapixel imagery on the Google Arts & Culture website and app and links to the National Gallery’s collection website, spanning 700 years of art history. These paintings include Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Sebastiano del Piombo's The Raising of Lazarus, Johannes Vermeer's A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun's Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, Edouard Manet's portrait of the artist Eva Gonzalès, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s The Red Boy and Claude Monet's The Water-Lily Pond.
A huge hit with audiences during the Covid lockdown, as visitors relied on digital ways to connect with their favourite paintings, Google Arts & Culture’s first tour of eight rooms of the National Gallery attracted over one million views between November 2020 and January 2021.
This is the latest collaboration between the National Gallery and Google Arts & Culture that started in 2011 by providing high-resolution viewing and 360-degree virtual tours of the collection. For its 200th anniversary (2024–2025), the Gallery collaborated with Google Arts & Culture on a project to digitise 200 of its paintings in high-resolution together with an AI-powered experience National Gallery Mixtape. (National Gallery Reframed
https://artsandculture.google.com/project/the-national-gallery)
Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital Services at the National Gallery, says: ‘It’s fantastic to have been able to capture this moment in time digitally and to be able to share it with our audiences around the world. We know how popular it is to be able to way to wander the Gallery’s rooms in your own time, whether that is with a painting you know well or if it’s something you are discovering for the first time. The tour is an important addition to the range of ways we offer audiences to experience the collection digitally as part of our ‘virtual gallery’ approach, something we are always looking to explore and expand with new technology as it develops.’
Chance Coughenour, Senior Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture, says: ‘Our mission at Google Arts & Culture has always been to make the world’s treasures accessible to anyone, anywhere. By bringing the National Gallery’s full Bicentenary redisplay online, we’re moving beyond just digital archiving to offering a truly immersive sense of presence. Whether you’re exploring the intricate details of a Van Eyck via gigapixel technology or virtually wandering through Room 34, this collaboration ensures that the 'Wonder of Art' is available to a global audience long after the physical displays change.’
