Gallery Hours

149 public-domain paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, hung on your television and changed on a timer. No account, no tracking.

Turn your Apple TV into a quiet picture frame.

Gallery Hours hangs a painting on your television and leaves it there. When the room is empty, or when nobody is watching anything else, the screen shows art instead of a menu.

THE COLLECTION 149 landscape paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection, spanning 1500 to 1912 and 103 artists — Manet, Rubens, Van Gogh, Daubigny, Frans Post, Theodore Rousseau and many less familiar names. Every piece is public domain, presented at full resolution with its title, artist, year and source.

HANG IT THE WAY YOU LIKE Choose how long each piece stays up, from five minutes to four hours. Add a digital matte in white, black, cream or grey, in thin, wide or shadowbox depth. Add a picture frame in classic, modern or ornate. Or show the bare canvas edge to edge.

CURATE IT Browse the whole collection as a grid and switch off anything you would rather not see. Press play on a piece to hang it immediately. The rotation remembers what you chose.

MADE FOR THE ROOM, NOT THE SCREEN Gallery Hours can read the lights and sensors in your home, if you want it to. With an ambient light sensor it matches the artwork's brightness and warmth to the room, so a painting does not glare at you in a dark lounge. With an occupancy sensor it can dim or blank the frame when you leave, and bring it back when you return.

This is entirely optional. Gallery Hours works perfectly with no smart home accessories at all, and asks for nothing until you turn it on.

ON THE HOME SCREEN Featured artwork appears in the Top Shelf above the app. Select a piece there and it opens hanging on that painting.

QUIET BY DESIGN No account. No sign-in. No advertising. No analytics, no tracking and no data collection of any kind. Artwork is cached so the same piece is not downloaded twice, and the frame nudges itself by a pixel now and then so static edges cannot mark an OLED panel.

The collection is refreshed over the air, so new work arrives without an app update.

Artwork is provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art under its Open Access programme and is in the public domain.