There’s so much we cannot say.
That is why we have art.
Estheet is for anyone, anywhere, who has ever gone quiet in front of a painting.
View it how it’s meant to be.
The Night Watch is 4.37 metres across, far wider than your outstretched arms. You step back to take it in. Every painting in the hall hangs as large, or as small, as it really is.
Stand where the painter stood.
Pinch, and come in until each pixel of the photograph meets a pixel of your screen. The stars open into ridges of paint, and you see which way his brush turned.
The light moves as you do.
As you walk, soft pools fall from the track lights, shadows lie beneath every frame, and each painting’s colour glows faintly on the wall beside it.
Know why the world can’t stop looking at it.
Leonardo softened the corners of her smile, so it comes and goes. Tap any painting, and a narrator tells its story as the view glides in to each detail.
Frame it the way you want.
Carved gilt after the Mauritshuis frame round the girl with the pearl, a Louis XIV after Berain, Dutch ebony after the frame on Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at 63. Every one is modelled, carved and lit, never painted on. Choose the one each painting wears.
Somewhere, Satie is playing.
Then Bach and Chopin: piano and strings to wander by, every recording free to share, softening whenever the narrator speaks.
Wander on, your own way.
By artist, by era, by movement, or shuffled: rehang the whole hall in a moment. Ask for any work by name, and the hall runs you there, past every painting in between.
The museum is open.
Take your time. A painting lets you in slowly. Coming soon to the Mac App Store; until then, the hall is open in your browser.
Every painting here is in the public domain; the photographs are from Wikimedia Commons, the music from Musopen and Kimiko Ishizaka.