Take a Museum Trip From Home: 5 Art Museums to Explore Online
There is something special about walking into a museum with no real plan. You might go looking for one particular painting and end up spending twenty minutes looking at something you had never heard of before. You might notice a colour, a face, a strange little object, or an artist whose name you suddenly want to know more about.
Of course, not everyone can simply walk into the Louvre, spend an afternoon at the Met, or wander through the galleries of London. Flights, visas, tickets, distance, and time can all get in the way. Thankfully, some of the world’s best museums have opened parts of their collections to everyone online. And honestly, sometimes that is all you need: a quiet afternoon, a cup of coffee, and a very good internet connection.
We picked five museums that offer something a little different online. Some let you virtually walk through their galleries, while others give you access to thousands of artworks, exhibitions, and stories you can explore at your own pace.
So if you are looking for inspiration, doing research, or simply want to see something beautiful today, start here.
1. National Museum of Women in the Arts
If you are reading Women in Arts, this one feels like an obvious place to begin.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to celebrating women artists, and its online resources give you plenty to explore from home. Its digital collection allows you to search works by artist, time period, medium, and theme, while its online exhibitions let you spend more time with individual artists and ideas.
And there is a lot more than simply scrolling through images. You can explore online exhibitions about artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Hung Liu, Ambreen Butt, Mary Ellen Mark, and Sonya Clark, among many others. There are also exhibitions looking at subjects such as women artists of the Dutch Golden Age, fashion in art, artists’ books, and the ways women have used everyday materials in their work.
One of the things we particularly love about this museum is how easy it is to fall down a rabbit hole. You might start with one artist and end up discovering five more.
And that is exactly what a good museum visit should do.
2. The National Gallery, London
If you have ever dreamed of wandering through London’s National Gallery, you can now get surprisingly close to the experience without boarding a plane.
The National Gallery offers a virtual tour created in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, allowing you to explore the Gallery’s rooms from your screen. The current tour includes more than 1,000 works spanning 700 years of art history, including famous paintings as well as works you may not recognise immediately.
You can come across familiar names such as Claude Monet and Jan van Eyck, but part of the fun is not knowing what you are going to find next. Instead of searching for a particular masterpiece, try moving through the rooms as if you were actually there.
Take your time with the paintings. Look at the backgrounds. Notice the clothing, gestures, architecture and tiny details that can easily disappear when you see a painting reproduced in a book or on social media.
It is also a lovely reminder that museums are not just collections of famous names. They are full of unexpected discoveries.
3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met is the kind of museum that can feel almost impossible to take in during one physical visit. Its collection spans around 5,000 years and includes more than 490,000 works of art. Online, you can explore that enormous collection without worrying about how many hours you have left before closing time.
But one of the best places to start is the museum’s Met 360° Project.
The project includes six immersive 360-degree videos that let you experience some of the museum’s most recognisable spaces from unusual perspectives. You can look around the Great Hall, explore the Temple of Dendur, see the Met Cloisters from above, and move through other galleries virtually.
There is something particularly enjoyable about the Temple of Dendur experience. Instead of simply looking at photographs of the space, you can look around it and get a sense of its scale and atmosphere.
And once you finish the virtual tour, you can move into the Met’s enormous online collection and start searching by artist, title, date or object.
Give yourself permission to get distracted. That is half the fun.
4. The British Museum
For anyone who loves the stories behind objects, the British Museum’s online collection is a wonderful place to spend some time.
The museum’s Collection Online gives you access to millions of objects and more than two million records, covering everything from ancient history to contemporary art. High-definition images can also be enlarged, making it possible to look closely at details you might otherwise miss.
You can search by artist, object, material, place, period and other categories, which means you can make your visit as focused or as random as you like. Want to look at ancient Egyptian objects? You can. Curious about jewellery? Search for it. Want to spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at prints and drawings? Absolutely.
The British Museum also has virtual galleries that allow you to explore parts of its collection from home. Its Prints and Drawings virtual gallery, for example, brings together works spanning from the 1400s to today, with images that can be examined in detail.
It is the kind of online museum experience that makes you realise just how much there is to learn from an object once you stop looking at it for only a few seconds.
5. The Louvre
There is a certain thrill in saying, “I’m going to the Louvre today,” even if your version of the Louvre happens to be a laptop on your desk.
The Louvre offers several online tours that let you explore its rooms, galleries and architecture from home. Its virtual experiences include exhibitions such as From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects, The Advent of the Artist, Power Plays, and The Body in Movement.
Rather than simply giving you a digital version of a museum map, these experiences are organised around stories and themes. You can learn how materials travelled between distant cultures, think about the relationship between art and political power, or explore the ways artists have represented movement.
And, of course, if you have always wanted to see what the Louvre has beyond the Mona Lisa, this is a good place to start. Because one of the best things about exploring a museum online is that there is no pressure to follow the crowd. You can skip what everyone else is looking at. You can zoom in. You can stop. You can go back. You can spend ten minutes with one painting simply because something about it caught your attention.
Lots of Art, Just a Click Away
We often think of visiting a museum as something that requires a trip, a ticket, a free afternoon and perhaps a little planning. But these online collections offer another way into art.
They are especially wonderful for artists. You can use them to research a particular period, study how other artists approached colour or composition, discover artists you’ve never encountered before, or simply look at art when you need a little inspiration. And perhaps that is the best reason to explore them.
You do not have to go online with a research question. You do not need to know what you are looking for. Pick a museum, open a collection, and start clicking. Follow one painting to another. Read an artist’s name and look them up. Notice something you like and save it for later. Let one work lead you somewhere completely unexpected. Because sometimes the best museum visit is the one where you do not have a plan at all.
Editor’s Note:
At Women in Arts Network, we keep bringing virtual exhibitions one after another for artists to submit their art to, and for art lovers and artists alike to view online, making it easily accessible to all. Our latest open call, Things We Feel, Virtual Exhibition, is open for submissions. Feel free to submit if you’re a woman or non-binary artist aged 18 or above. We can’t wait to see your entries!
