Claude Monet can almost be guaranteed to appear every year in this top ten category, and 2019 was no exception with shows dedicated to the famed Impressionist in Vienna and San Francisco attracting 4,961 and 3,615 visitors a day respectively. Exhibitions comprised of loans from London’s Courtauld Gallery (while closed for refurbishment) claim two places in the list, with 4,712 visitors a day to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and 3,802 to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Russians cannot get enough of Ilya Repin, another perennial top ten high scorer, but the numbers for the little-known Russian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi come as a surprise. Around 3,300 visitors a day went to the State Tretyakov Gallery to see Russian landscapes by Kuindzhi, a contemporary of Repin who specialised in realistic light effects. The great popular success of the Berthe Morisot exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, seen by 4,959 visitors a day, may help to further to redress the art-historical balance in favour of women artists.
Top ten 19th century art exhibitions
• For The Art Newspaper’s full Art’s Most Popular visitor figures survey, see our April issue. To read a selection online, see Art’s Most Popular 2020