The National Gallery of Ireland has announced that tickets for its present exhibition of French Impressionist paintings are now completely sold out.
Even though the show is due to continue for another month, the gallery will accept no further bookings from potential visitors.
The exhibition, Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape, is on loan from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and opened in the National Gallery's new millennium wing in late January. Since then it has proved to be the most popular show yet arranged by the institution and is expected to have attracted more than 120,000 visitors by its conclusion on April 14th. This figure includes about 15,000 schoolchildren who have travelled in parties from throughout the country.
According to the gallery's director, Mr Raymond Keaveney, the public response to the exhibition has exceeded his expectations, with numbers sometimes reaching 1,500 per day.
"Our estimates in advance were conservative," he said, "because we were rather stepping into the unknown. This kind of exhibition is hugely popular elsewhere, so there is no reason why Dublin should be any different."
Responding to complaints from some members of the public that they had been unable to book tickets and would therefore now be unable to visit the show, Mr Keaveney said: "For us this is a no-win situation. It's a universal principle that early booking is essential, and once something is booked out, it's booked out. The alternative is to risk serious over-crowding, and we have also had a few complaints from the public about that."
The gallery is now preparing for its next event, a collection of American art from the 18th to the 20th centuries from the Detroit Institute of Art, which will run for three months from mid-June.