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Semantic Search
You don't need to know the artist or the title. Describe what you remember — a mood, a scene, a colour, a feeling — and Retrievals finds it across 68,000 works in the National Gallery of Art's open collection.
Describe what you're looking for
Describe a memory, material, artist, mood, or period and see where our archive leads you.
Retrievals uses a multimodal vision-language model to embed every artwork in the NGA collection as a vector — a mathematical representation of its visual and semantic content. When you type a description, your words are embedded the same way and compared against all 68,000 vectors simultaneously.
The result is search that understands meaning, not just keywords. “Stormy sea at dusk” finds Turner and van Ruisdael without either name appearing in your query. “Woman in yellow light reading” finds Vermeer.