Alistair Hardaker | Image: Screenshot of the National Gallery Google Arts and Culture Virtual Tour C C Land The Wonder of Art Room 34
Google Arts & Culture collaboration expands National Gallery online access from eight rooms to full collection display of bicentenary redisplay.
The National Gallery has launched a comprehensive virtual tour showing all of its collection display rooms online for the first time, in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.
The tour captures the 2024-25 bicentenary redisplays of the entire collection, CC Land: The Wonder of Art. The previous virtual tour, which has been available on the National Gallery’s website since 2016, showed the contents of eight rooms.
Visitors can choose between a comprehensive tour of all the gallery’s collection picture rooms or a highlights tour covering seven rooms selected by curators. The highlights tour focuses on specific paintings in each room, with links to gigapixel imagery on the Google Arts & Culture website and app.
Featured paintings in the highlights tour 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.
The previous eight-room tour attracted more than one million views between November 2020 and January 2021.
“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,” said Lawrence Chiles, head of digital services at the National Gallery.
The National Gallery’s collaboration with Google Arts & Culture began in 2011. For the gallery’s 200th anniversary in 2024-25, the partnership also produced a project to digitise 200 paintings in high resolution, alongside an AI-powered experience called National Gallery Mixtape.
The virtual tour is available here
