Explore
How to Explore 780,000+ Artworks
Artheon holds the open collections of eight museums — the Met, the Rijksmuseum, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland, the Belvedere, the Smithsonian, and SMK — the National Gallery of Denmark — plus a living wing of working artists, all in one place. Exploring is free and needs no account. Here is how to get lost in it well.
You will need
- Nothing. Browsing, searching, and zooming are free with no sign-up — an account only adds favorites and collections.
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Start with a search
The search box is on every page. Try an artist (“Hokusai”), a subject (“winter landscape”), or a mood (“storm at sea”) — the search understands descriptions and looks across all eight museums and the community wing at once.
Vague works. “Sad woman reading a letter” is a perfectly good query here.
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Follow the similar artworks
Every artwork page ends with a row of visually similar works, matched by AI across the whole collection — not by label, but by what the image actually looks like. This is the best way to explore: one Dutch winter scene leads to a Japanese snow print leads to a photograph you would never have searched for.
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Browse by artist, movement, period, or theme
Every artist name links to their page with everything we hold by them. The Movements, Periods, and Themes sections group the collection the way an art history course would — Impressionism, the Edo period, birds, portraits.
Artist pages have a slideshow view — “View all as a slideshow” turns a life’s work into something you can lean back and watch.
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Look closer
Open any artwork fullscreen and zoom — most works are served at museum-grade resolution, close enough to see brushwork and paper grain. Public-domain works can be downloaded for free use; each page states the work’s rights.
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Ask about what you’re seeing
Every artwork page has “Ask Artheon’s AI Assistant.” Ask what a symbol means, how the technique works, or what was happening when it was painted — it answers about the specific work in front of you.
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Save what you love
With a free account, the heart saves a work to your favorites, and “Add to Collection” builds named groupings — your own wings of the museum. Both are the raw material for exhibitions later, if curating tempts you.
That’s the visitor’s museum. When looking turns into wanting to arrange or make — curating an exhibition or hanging your own work — the other guides take over.