Love Art: The National Gallery review

Andrew Williams

We review Love Art: The National Gallery, an art appreciation app that's a bit of a flawed masterpiece

Published on Sep 4, 2009

Lots of museums in London can be visited for free. Yes, you can enrich yourself culturally without even spending a penny. In this spirit, Love Art: The National Gallery is free to download and gives you a taster for what’s in store should you choose to visit one of London’s more venerable repositories of arty goodness.

It contains information about some of history’s master artists, including Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Renoir. There are eleven artists given the spotlight treatment, and their works are explored through video and audio clips, while it also lets you take a look at works from the artists themselves. All of this is included in the initial 200MB+ download, meaning that nothing has to be streamed off the net. Although this means it’s a bit of a wide load if you’re low on space, it’s one of the app’s best features.

While we have absolutely no qualms with the content on offer in Love Art: The National Gallery, with contributions from experts and critics proving to be frequently fascinating, the app itself could do with a bit of a re-work.

Firstly, the interface is a tad confusing. The main menu consists of a scrollable list- a contents page of sorts. Although these are generally the names of artists, there’s also an intro to the gallery itself and a section on English vs. French art. It’s all not quite well labelled enough, making your initial reaction to the app one of confusion.

Once you’ve dug in a bit and worked out the interface for yourself, there are still some confusing elements. Within the artist categories, the various videos and audio clips are signposted fairly clearly with icons denoting their type, but there’s also a gallery where you can look at a selection of paintings at your leisure. Except that they’re not exclusively by the artist in question.

Instead, they’re from a bunch of other artists from vaguely the same period. Sure, there’s generally some connection between the different paintings, but it’s a pretty tenuous one that’s highlighted in an all-too-short one-sentence blurb.

They’re still a pleasure to look at, and you’re told who they’re by, plus you can watch them in a slide show if you fancy. We do wish that you could zoom into them though.

Lush as the iPhone’s screen may be, it’s never going to do justice to a masterpiece. You can zoom freely into the paintings accompanied by an audio commentary. They're not quite as high resolution as we'd like, but being able to check out the pictures being discussed fully is great. It's a pity that the app doesn't override the iPhone's sleep function for those that just want to listen though.

This strange juxtaposition of depth and surface exploration of the pieces bleeds into the secondary navigational tool, the insight wheel. We’re sure the makers of the app meant well when constructing it, but it is rather cringeworthy.

Here, you can find artworks by selecting such terms as ‘Honesty’, ‘Vanity’ and ‘Devotion’. It’s arguably this sort of melodramatic approach to art that puts many people off visiting art galleries- this slopping-on of a layer that demands a certain strength of reaction to the art itself. Thankfully, it’s got its own tab so you can easily ignore it.

Part of the reason why we’re so keen to pick holes in Love Art: The National Gallery is that it could be an absolutely amazing application. Given the full backing of the gallery, it could prove to be the best art book never published. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s still a great download to get you in the mood for a visit to the gallery itself.