The tour has been created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.
The National Gallery’s collection displays can now be seen via an online tour on its website for the first time in 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.
Previous to this tour its prior iteration – which has been a part of the National Gallery’s website since 2016 – has only shown the contents of eight rooms.
With this extensive experience, visitors can can either join a comprehensive tour of all the Gallery’s collection picture rooms or try a highlights tour covering seven rooms, handpicked by the curators. The highlights tour 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.
The online tour originally appeared during Covid lockdown from November 2020.
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.’