The National Gallery is inviting art lovers to take a virtual wander through its galleries from home, having expanded its online tour in partnership with Google Arts & Culture.
Previous online tours on the gallery’s website only covered eight rooms, but now every picture room in the gallery can be explored online, offering a Vicarious Visit through the museum’s bicentenary redisplay.
The virtual experience offers two options: a full walkthrough of all the gallery rooms, or a shorter highlights tour curated by staff to recreate the feel of a whistle-stop gallery visit. The seven-room highlights route includes famous works such as Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Johannes Vermeer’s A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, and Claude Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond.
Visitors can also zoom into selected paintings using gigapixel imagery on the Google Arts & Culture platform, allowing viewers to inspect brushstrokes and fine details that can often be difficult to see in person.
The virtual tour is here.
Lawrence Chiles, the gallery’s Head of Digital Services, said the project lets people “wander the Gallery’s rooms in your own time”, whether revisiting favourite paintings or discovering works for the first time.
The idea of digitally wandering through galleries became especially popular during the Covid lockdowns, when physical museums were shut. The National Gallery says its earlier eight-room virtual tour attracted more than a million views between November 2020 and January 2021, as people sought cultural escapes from home.
The expanded online tour is part of a long-running collaboration between the National Gallery and Google Arts & Culture that dates back to 2011, when the gallery first began offering high-resolution digital views and 360-degree virtual tours of its collection.