Walk the Living Museum after hours

The Living Museum now has a hall of its own. Every masterpiece in it hangs along one long wall of deep red damask, in a carved wooden frame, under its own lamp. The visitors have gone home. You have the place to yourself.

Walk along the wall. Scroll, or swipe up, and you walk to the next painting. Stop in front of one and its story begins, right there on the canvas. Drag sideways to look around the room. Come in with the sound on: the hall has a quiet hush of its own, and the stories bring their own sound.

Look closer. Tap Discover under a painting, then the magnifying glass. Move it over the canvas and you see what a gallery’s rope keeps you from: the ridges of Van Gogh’s paint, the fine cracks in an old varnish. For eighty of the paintings, the glass shows the very file the print is made from. While you look, the story pauses and the painting holds still. Put the glass down and the story carries on.

Everything else under Discover. The painting’s poem, on a little museum label. A tape measure that shows the print at the size you choose. And a card that puts it in your bag, without leaving the hall.

Find your way. A hundred and twenty paintings is a long walk. Tap Jump to at the top left. Search for a painter, a year or a movement, or narrow the wall to the Impressionists or to Van Gogh. Line the paintings up three ways: as the shop recommends them, by the year they were painted, or newest to the shop first. Not sure what you are after? Let the arts find you opens right there in the hall, and walks you to what it finds.

It works on a phone and on a computer. You will find the way in on The Living Museum’s page, beside the door to the Vault.