Birmingham's Pre-Raphaelite Paintings Up Close and Pixel Perfect

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has become the world's first museum to present its collection online with pixel perfect image definition and color. In a project that has lasted more than a year and is still on going, more than 2,000 works of art were catalogued, photographed and made available online with a browser plug-in known as Silverlight.

Paintings, drawings and prints from Birmingham's world renown Pre-Raphaelite collection, including works by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones and many others, can be viewed up close in lifelike detail, using the website's deep zoom feature.

Try it by visiting The Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource. It's a fabulous collection of artworks and this is a terrific way of looking at it.

An even better way, of course, would be to include Birmingham in your vacation touring plans and visit the Gallery yourself. This once industrial city in the Midlands is full of surprises.

• Birmingham Travel Guide
• Shopping in the Jewelry Quarter
• The IKON Gallery

Nota bene In yet another example of the Microsoft versus the rest of the world syndrome, the Silverlight plug-in,which enables the Pre-Raphaelite website and is a Microsoft product, can only be used with some non-Microsoft browsers such as Firefox, after first being downloaded from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Once done, however, you can open the website and use its zoom features in the browser of your choice.

_{Images of "The Last of England" by Ford Maddox Brown, Courtesy of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery | UK Travel Blog | share on facebook | Twit This}