Art Galleries Well and Truly Googled!

If you wanted to find out more about this painting... even go to see the original of this painting, where would you go?

National Gallery, London? The Met, New York? Galleria Borghese, Rome? Well, your first stop should be Google. More specifically, The Google Art Project.

Recently Updated and Enlarged
Google have married various of their technologies to create a unique online art experience, in partnership with some 150 galleries and museums across 40 countries. The recently updated online gallery, now has some 30,000 works of art in glorious high definition.

In addition (this is Google we are talking about!), you are able to take a virtual tour of the museums and galleries, wandering about through the exhibits courtesy of your mouse and Google "Street-View" technology.

Hundreds of Collections to Browse
Dabblers and art lovers can wander around from artist to artist, gallery to gallery, collection to collection using the intuitive and easy to master filtering system, whilst serious art students can get to grips with, say, a chosen artist, within a few mouse clicks. Google have made it easy by allowing users to refine, filter and view Artworks and Artists from across 100’s of collections. This allows you for example to instantly discover all the Rembrandts in the project and allows you to explore, for example artworks from the same period from that particular collection. You can browse the content through: the artist’s name, the artwork, the type of art, the collection, the country, city and you can also create your own virtual galleries. Naturally, being Google, you can also enjoy the essence of the art works thanks to the slideshow mode and the zoom feature that allows you to examine every inch of a painting in great detail.

This way, you could soon become an expert in, a single artist, an art movement, or a genre... such as the "Swagger" style of Rococo portraiture. Which brings us back to Mary Hickey. It was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1770, you can see it in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA.

How do we know all this?... just ask Google!

Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889
- MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York -
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So How Does it Work?

First you will need to download the viewer that makes it all work, from Google Chrome. Don't worry about this though, because if you haven't already got it on your computer, the Google Art Project will let you have it free with just one click, when you first go onto their site.

Simply select a museum from the homepage and then either choose ‘Explore the museum’ or ‘View Artwork’. Once you are in the main site use the drop-down menus or the side info bar to navigate between artworks and museums. As you get to grips with the site's functionality, you can create your own galleries and also create and share your own collections online.

Happy browsing... click the logo below

Visit the Google Art Project
- click the logo above -

Archived Art Stories

Monet Exhibition
The Rencontres D'Arles - photography
Watercolour Workshop - watercolourist