Samsung’s Art Store, the subscription gallery built into its Frame TVs, has added 30 works from the British Museum. The collection is exclusive to the platform and went live on 6 October. It leans heavily on two of Britain’s best-known landscape painters, John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, plus a handful of other artists Samsung has not named.
The choice of artists fits the format. Constable built his reputation on the English countryside and, above all, on skies, painting cloud and weather with a closeness few of his contemporaries attempted. Turner’s watercolours in the set run from turbulent seascapes such as A Storm (Shipwreck) to city views of Venice, Rome and Zurich. Constable’s Fisherton Mill is another named inclusion. Calm, atmospheric landscapes are exactly what people want hanging in a living room, which is probably why they suit a TV that pretends to be a framed picture.
There is also a practical reason this is a British Museum collection of drawings and watercolours rather than famous oil paintings. The museum holds Britain’s national collection of prints and drawings, while many of Constable’s and Turner’s best-known canvases hang elsewhere in London. Anyone hoping for The Hay Wain or The Fighting Temeraire will be disappointed. Anyone happy to explore lesser-known works on paper may find this the more interesting set.
Getting the collection works the same way as the rest of the Art Store: subscribers on compatible Samsung Art TVs pick a piece, display it, and swap whenever they like. Samsung has not said which models count as compatible, or whether the subscription price changes with the new content. The company frames the move as part of a mission to make art more accessible. That is fair to a point, but the collection sits behind a paywall on premium hardware, while the British Museum itself is free to enter.
The deal also extends a wider relationship. Samsung is a corporate partner of the museum’s Korea exhibition, which opened on 1 October and runs until 31 January 2027, so the Art Store collection looks like one piece of a broader cultural sponsorship.
For Samsung, the business case is clear. Lifestyle TVs that double as decor have become a crowded category, with rivals such as Hisense and TCL now selling their own art-mode screens. Panel quality is easy to copy; exclusive licensing deals with major institutions are not. Thirty works is a modest addition. The more telling question is whether Samsung keeps signing museum partnerships quickly enough that buyers start choosing the Frame for its catalogue rather than its screen.
