5 Great Museums in the World to Visit from Your Classroom or Home

Last updated on 29 September 2023

Nothing will ever replace the emotion that can be felt in front of a painting, a real canvas of master. When you are lucky enough to be able to go to a museum, do not hesitate. However, the net can provide many services if one does not have this opportunity. Most of the big ones museums have set up showcase sites offering virtual tours and unlimited access 24 hours a day to their most beautiful collections. Here is a small selection of five. Five great museums in the world that you will be able to visit from home. Follow the guide, I offer links to the online collections of each of them.

The Louvre.

We don't go very far for this first step. Passage required by the Louvre Museum. The masterpieces housed in the Parisian museum give rise to vertigo. Nearly 1 500 of them can be seen on the museum’s website, each with a detailed explanatory note. A few magnifying works complete the picture (this is the case to say). The site of the Louvre Museum deserves a small redesign to dust off an old-fashioned ergonomics and an organization a little stuff everything. But the richness of its collections shines despite the dust.
Link: Louvre Museum

The Prado.

We cross the Pyrenees for a visit to the National Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. The museum has just celebrated its bicentenary and offers on its website an exciting account of the history of the Palace. Also on the front page is information on ongoing temporary exposures. You have to get a little lost in its virtual corridors to find a search engine that allows you to explore all these collections. More than 15 000 works classified and documented with high-definition images in which you can zoom endlessly. The Prado offers, for example, nearly 900 works for Goya alone.
Link: Prado Museum

British Museum

With one click, let’s go to London to visit the venerable British Museum. In addition to the Museum's news and the pages reserved for outstanding teachers, the venerable British Museum offers online access to all these collections. This innovative database is one of the oldest and largest online museum search platforms in the world. Almost three million objects and works of all kinds are referenced with high-quality photos that can be downloaded.
Link: British Museum

Rijks Museum

Next stop Amsterdam for an impromptu visit to the Rijks Museum. A few years ago, the Dutch institution started to digitise all its collections. Ultimately, the goal is to put everything, absolutely everything online, at the rate of 40,000 new works per year. The Rijks museum offers a modern and very successful site that plays the interactivity with the visitor. In the Rijksstudio section you will be able to create your own online museum. You will hang the works that have most interested you. You will be able to keep the entire image of a work or only a piece of it. You can classify your choices by collections or keywords. That's great.
Link: Rijks Museum

MoMa.

Last stop on the other side of the Atlantic with a visit to MoMa, New York City's famous Museum of Modern Art. The MoMa has a collection of modern and contemporary works of art of around 200 000 pieces. Just under half are accessible online via the site. Among the masterpieces in Ali Baba’s cave is Vincent Van Gogh’s magnificent starry night.
Link: MoMa

This is the first list of major world museums to visit from your computer. And if that's not enough, you can also, I advise you, look at the side of Google. Its mobile application Google Arts and Culture puts works of art from more than 1000 museums in your pocket.