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Those of us who grew up in an age before computers and instant digital access are tripping out on today’s technology. We never imagined having anything close to the ability to virtually tour a museum. The next time you’re bored and online, check out one of the many museums, art galleries and other places which you can visit virtually. While everyone takes digital real time access for granted, the HD quality makes it’s almost as good as being there.
Museum quality graphics
Pointing your browser to “Google Arts & Culture” opens up a whole world of exciting virtual reality art and culture experiences. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands happens to show up at the top of the list.
Wandering around takes some practice but it’s easy to get the hang of.
Reading the tags next to the museum exhibits isn’t all that easy but that’s acceptable when the content is free and you don’t even have to fight for parking.
What is really nice is the ability to walk right around the three dimensional sculpture pieces. We learned later that the information comes in pop ups.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Russia has some interesting exhibits too. Hercules and Omphale caught our attention and that’s when we noticed a helpful little information box popped up.
Clicking it leads to a better copy of the painting, it informs that it was painted by François Boucher in the 1730s. It also reveals that “Boucher’s early works reveal his connections with seventeenth-century art.”
The ‘Rubenesque” style
“As a young man he made copies and engravings of Watteau. His ‘Hercules and Omphale‘ was executed under the impression of Ruben’s full-blooded, temperamental painting, but the subject is typical if Rococo.”
“Sold into slavery to Queen Omphale of Ludia and doomed to do a woman’s work, Hercules suddenly appears as a passionate lover ready to please his mistress’s slightest whim.”
Here in America, WB decided to drop into the Smithsonian American Art Museum. That’s where “Among the Sierra Nevada, California” jumped off the wall at us.
Now we know it was painted in 1868 and they have it at the “bequest of Helen Huntington Hull, granddaughter of William Brown Dinsmore, who acquired the painting in 1873 for ‘The Locusts,‘ the family estate in Dutchess County, New York Artist: Albert Bierstadt”
