Manet comes to Golden Square

I'm loving the new National Gallery campaign - The Grand Tour - which has, with beautiful simplicity, taken its art out onto the streets of central London. The campaign is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and comes with its own Flickr group.

Amazingly, most of these pictures seem to have survived being stolen or vandalised - perhaps the art really is having a civilising effect on us all.

This Manet is hanging outside the front door of the Harvest Digital office.

Here's the card describing the picture - with a nice link to an audio tour you can access via your mobile. 

 And finally, a sense of what some of these pictures have to compete with in terms of a typical London street scene - this is the main entrance of what used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus. You'd like to think that the National Gallery provides a slightly less cluttered visual backdrop for their paintings!