Museum of World Art: a free museum you walk through in your browser. Ride the escalator down under the glass emblem to the Hall, then the galleries — real works, out of copyright everywhere, from the world’s great open collections.
Dragons, demons, ghosts, witches and heroes. Every culture told stories about what waits in the dark, and artists gave them faces. An exhibition for the month of Halloween.
From the Hall: the Room of Icons, The Season’s hall and the Helix stair up to the Gallery House; the ancient world to the west; the Grand Gallery to the east; down the Imperial Stair, the lower floor.
Off the Hall
Room of Icons — Twelve of the most famous pictures in the world, which in life hang in a dozen cities on three continents, here on four walls. The twelve change…
The Season — The Mouseion’s exhibition hall. A new exhibition opens on the first of every month, drawn from museum collections around the world and built around…
Ancient Worlds · c. 3000 BCE – 500 CE
Egypt & Nubia — For three thousand years the Nile valley made art for eternity: statues to house the spirit, painted coffins, amulets, and everyday things buried so…
Mesopotamia & Persia — Between the Tigris and the Euphrates people built the first cities and wrote the first words, pressed into clay. Assyrian palace reliefs, cylinder…
Greece & Rome — Painted vases that told the myths, portraits of emperors, and bronzes small enough to hold. Greece set the ideal of the human figure; Rome copied…
Europe 1300–1800 · 1300 – 1800
The Renaissance — From gold-ground altarpieces to oil paint and perspective: two centuries in which painters in Florence, Venice, Bruges and Nuremberg learned to make…
The Golden Age — The seventeenth century: Caravaggio’s darkness and light, Rubens’s energy, Velázquez in Madrid, and in the Dutch Republic a new market of ordinary…
Enlightenment & Revolution — Rococo pleasure gardens, then the cool lines of Neoclassicism, then revolution. The eighteenth century painted pleasure, reason and politics, often…
The Long Century · 1800 – 1930
Romanticism & Realism — Storms, ruins, mountains and the sublime, then a turn to the real: peasants, labourers and the people painters passed in the street. Turner…
Impressionism — Painting outdoors, fast, in broken colour: Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot, Degas and Cassatt caught the light of a passing moment and were mocked…
After Impressionism — Van Gogh’s brushwork, Cézanne’s solid geometry, Gauguin’s flat colour, Seurat’s dots, and the dreamlike Symbolists: the painters who took…
New Worlds 1900–1930 — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and the first abstract paintings. In thirty years art broke with five centuries of looking through a…
Asia & the Islamic World · c. 1000 BCE – 1930
Japan — Woodblock prints of the "floating world" of actors, beauties and travellers, painted screens and scrolls, lacquer and ceramics. The prints of…
China & Korea — Bronze vessels older than writing on paper, jade, porcelain, and painting with the brush, where landscape was the highest subject and a poem and a…
South & Southeast Asia — Gods and guardians in stone and bronze, Mughal and Rajput miniatures painted with a single-hair brush, and the art of the courts and temples from…
The Islamic World — From Spain to India: calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, tiles, carpets, metalwork and glass. Pattern and the written word are the great…
Africa, Oceania & the Americas · c. 1200 BCE – 1930
The Ancient Americas — Olmec jade, Maya painted vessels, Andean textiles and gold, and the ceramics of the peoples of the Americas before 1500, made by civilisations that…
Africa & Oceania — Textiles, ceramics, gold, ivory, and works for the court and the household from across Africa and the Pacific. We show only objects made to be seen…
Works on Paper · 1450 – 1930
Prints, Drawings & Photographs — Dürer’s engravings, Rembrandt’s etchings, Japanese prints, botanical studies and the first photographs. Paper fades in light, so in a real museum…
The Season, 2026
January 2026: Snow and Silence — Winter in art, from Bruegel to Hiroshige
February 2026: Love Stories — Lovers, letters and longing
November 2026: Silk Roads — Art across Asia and the trade routes
December 2026: Gold and Light — Festivals, candles and gilded things
Where the works come from
Every work in the Mouseion is a real piece, out of copyright everywhere, shown from the open collections of the museums that hold it — each label names the original’s museum and links to its page there.
Wikimedia Commons — public-domain photographs of works held elsewhere
Rent a hall for your own show
The Gallery House on the court rents five halls by the week — two Project Rooms (C$40 a week, up to 12 works), two Galleries (C$75, up to 24) and the Grand Hall (C$150, up to 40) — hung in one of four layouts, or arranged by the renter themselves in a copy of their hall. How it works.
Across the court
The Auctionarium, the Grid’s auction house: timed sales of original art and collectibles by Grid creatives. The Passage stairs lead up to it from the Hall.
Questions people ask
What is the Mouseion?
The Mouseion is the Grid’s museum of world art: a free museum you walk through in your browser, under Emblem Court in the Grid. Its galleries run from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through the Renaissance and the Impressionists to Japan, China, the Islamic world, Africa, Oceania and the ancient Americas.
Is it free?
Yes. Walking in and looking at every room is free, for guests and accounts alike. Only the halls in the Gallery House cost anything to rent, and a renter may charge entry to their own show.
Are the works real?
Yes — every work is a real piece held by a real museum, out of copyright everywhere, shown from that museum’s open collection. Each label names the museum that holds the original and links to it.
How often does it change?
Every room rehangs each month from its collection, The Season hall has a new exhibition every month, and the Room of Icons shows a different twelve masterpieces each quarter.
Can I show my own work there?
Yes. The Gallery House on the court rents five halls by the week: two Project Rooms, two Galleries and the Grand Hall, from C$40 a week. See /mouseion/halls.
How do I get there?
Open the Grid in your browser (nothing to download), then walk or take a taxi to Emblem Court by the Wheel, go in through the glass emblem and ride the escalator down to the Hall.