Featured
The pictures each museum puts at the front of its own collection: chosen by its curators, not by an algorithm, and drawn from every movement here.
The collection
The galleries
27 rooms, from the Renaissance to the far side of the Moon. Every picture in them is checked by hand and cut to fill a television. The museum galleries are all in the public domain; the photography is licensed by the photographers who made it.
Space
Nebulae, planets, and the far side of the Moon, photographed by the telescopes, probes and crews that went to look.
Earth from Above
Fifty years of NASA Landsat pictures of rivers, deserts and ice, picked for their beauty rather than their science.
Early Colour Photography
Colour before colour film was ordinary: Photochrom prints of the 1890s and Kodachromes of wartime America.
American Painting
Portraits, prairies, and prizefights: a young country working out what its own pictures should look like.
Impressionism
Broken colour, visible brushwork, and a fixation on light at one particular moment of one particular day.
Romanticism
Feeling over rule. Storms, ruins, and landscapes scaled to make the viewer feel small.
Realism
Labourers, gleaners, and unglamorous rooms, painted at the scale previously reserved for gods and generals.
Hudson River School
American wilderness painted as scripture: luminous valleys, enormous skies, and weather doing the talking.
Ukiyo-e
Woodblock prints of the floating world: actors, courtesans, and the travel views that rewired European painting.
Baroque
Theatre in paint: a hard raking light, deep shadow, and figures caught at the loudest moment of the story.
Master Drawings
Chalk, ink, and wash: the working thought behind the finished picture, and often the better half of it.
Post-Impressionism
Impressionism's colour kept, its modesty discarded: structure, symbol, and feeling pushed to the front.
Photography
Photographs by people still working: landscapes, weather and light, given freely by the photographers who made them.
Dutch Golden Age
A republic of merchants painting its own weather: flat horizons, windmills, sea, and rooms full of quiet business.
Rococo
The Baroque unbuttoned: pastel, asymmetry, and aristocratic leisure painted with a very light touch.
Renaissance
Linear perspective, anatomy, and antiquity rediscovered. Painting stops being a surface and starts being a window.
Barbizon School
Painters who left the studio for the forest at Fontainebleau and made ordinary countryside the whole subject.
Abstract
Shape and colour with nothing to depict: flat forms, poured ink and pattern by artists working now.
Maps & Star Charts
The world and the heavens as engravers pictured them: celestial atlases, constellation figures, and maps drawn long before anyone saw either from above.
Symbolism
Dreams, myth, and mood in place of description. The subject is usually something that cannot be photographed.
Early Modern Painting
Flattened space and simplified form as the twentieth century starts pulling the picture apart.
Architecture
Buildings photographed for their geometry rather than their address: concrete, glass, stairwells and the light falling across them.
Neoclassicism
A deliberate cold shower after the Rococo: clean contour, classical subject matter, and civic seriousness.
ASCII Art
Pictures made of letters and symbols: landscapes, planets and patterns drawn in text by bas3line.
Illustration
Drawn pictures of something: figures, places and stories set down by illustrators working now.
Old Master Prints
Engraving and etching from Dürer to Rembrandt: the first art most people ever owned, and the first that travelled.