Samsung Art Store adds 30 British Museum masterworks

Samsung Art Store is adding an exclusive collection of 30 works from the British Museum. The selection arrives on compatible Samsung Art televisions, including The Frame, from 6 October, and leans heavily on British landscape painting.

Turner, Constable and a wall of British weather

The headline names are John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Samsung points to Constable's English countryside vistas and his habit of catching a shifting sky, and to Turner's watercolours, which run from stormy seascapes to views of Venice, Rome and Zurich. The announcement illustrates the collection with Turner's A Storm (Shipwreck) and Constable's Fisherton Mill, both shown on The Frame Pro.

How it works

Art Store subscribers can browse the British Museum selection, choose a work to display on the television and switch to another whenever they like. It follows the museum-collection model Samsung has already used for the Stedelijk Museum, the MUNCH, the Louvre and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Samsung also notes that it is a corporate partner of the British Museum's Korea exhibition, which opened on 1 October and runs until 31 January 2027.

Our opinion

Streaming a painting is not the same as standing in front of it, and Samsung's Art Store has always carried that faint whiff of the screensaver. The British Museum deal quietly answers the strongest objection, though. Museums hold far more than they can hang, and a great deal of it stays in storage for decades, so a subscription that pulls Turner watercolours out of the dark and onto the wall of a rented flat is doing something a gift-shop print cannot. The Frame's real trick was never fidelity. It is that the television stops being a black rectangle when nobody is watching it, and filling that rectangle from a collection that began in 1753 is a far better use of a very good panel than another looping stock video.

Availability and reaction

The British Museum collection goes live on Samsung Art Store from 6 October. Gwiho Lee, executive vice president of Samsung's Visual Display business, said the company is committed to using its technology to make world-class art more accessible, while Lisa San Martin, interim commercial director at the British Museum, said the museum hopes the collection encourages viewers to explore works they already know and discover others for the first time.