Google and the Courtauld Invite Viewers to Slow Down and Look Closer

Google Arts & Culture and the Courtauld Institute of Art have expanded their digital partnership with The Art of Looking, a collection designed to make sustained attention feel newly rewarding. Its 12 stories move across centuries and continents while asking direct questions about meaning, access, technique, and the people for whom art is made.

The project combines the Courtauld's scholarship with zoomable, high-resolution imagery. Viewers can follow the movement of Van Gogh's reed pen, examine the deliberately unsettled reflection in Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, and consider how scale gives Claudette Johnson's figures their commanding presence. Other stories center artists including Lubaina Himid, Rosa Bonheur, and Michelangelo.

Featured image: Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1882. The Courtauld; image via Google Arts & Culture.

The launch builds on work that began in 2022, when Google's Art Camera captured 16 Courtauld works in enough detail to bring brushwork, surface, and small compositional decisions into view online. The new stories turn that image resolution into guided encounters rather than treating digitization as a substitute for a gallery visit.

Alongside the collection, the two institutions announced an artist residency focused on using AI in cultural-collection metadata workflows. The stated aim is to make the Courtauld's extensive photographic holdings easier to search and connect with educational material, adding a practical research strand to the public-facing project.

Explore The Art of Looking on Google Arts & Culture. Read the original announcement from Google, written by Courtauld director Mark Hallett and Google Arts & Culture director Amit Sood.