National Gallery London masterpieces show in Shanghai

The National Gallery has just staged its most popular touring exhibition ever - not in its London home, but in China.To get more shanghai newspaper, you can visit citynewsservice.cn official website.

Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London, which closed at the Shanghai Museum on 7 May, attracted more than 420,000 visitors in its 15-week run, or more than 4,300 a day, each paying 100 yuan ($14) to see the show.

Until then, the National Gallery's most successful paid exhibition had been Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, which attracted 3,680 people a day to the museum in 2011-12, for a total of 323,827 visitors.

International tour Botticelli to Van Gogh was conceived as a concise history of Western painting and comprises 52 loans from the National Gallery's permanent collection, including works by Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Constable, Turner and Monet. It is now on display at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul (until 9 October) and will then travel to its final venue, the Hong Kong Palace Museum (15 November - 4 March 2024).

The decision to send a selection of paintings to Asia was taken by the National Gallery's board in the run-up to the closure of the museum's Sainsbury Wing for a £35 million refurbishment. In September 2022, the board approved the contract for the Botticelli to Van Gogh international tour after "careful consideration", the gallery said.

"The National Gallery has an important role to play in promoting the UK's globally recognised position as a centre for culture and the arts, and we remain passionately committed to international cultural exchange," said its director, Gabriele Finaldi, when the exhibition was announced.

The museum won't reveal the returns on its Asian loans, but the National Gallery's board was presumably mindful of China's huge appetite for Western art when it approved them: in 2018, the Shanghai Museum hosted Tate's most visited exhibition ever, Landscapes of the Mind: Masterpieces from Tate Britain (1700-1980), which attracted 615,000 visitors in 14 weeks - more than 6,000 a day.

As London's major museums struggle to rebuild visitor numbers in the wake of the pandemic and the resulting drop in international tourism - the National Gallery had 2.7 million visitors last year, down 55% on its 2019 figure of 6 million - curators are likely to continue to seek new commercial opportunities abroad, with Chinese museums topping the list of lucrative international partners.

The Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate in London all have long-standing collaborations in China, while the Uffizi in Florence recently signed a €6m deal to send ten exhibitions to Shanghai's Bund One Art Museum over five years (Botticelli and the Renaissance, a loan exhibition of 48 paintings from the Uffizi, is currently on show there until 27 August). All these institutions have remained silent on China's human rights record, its crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, its detention of around 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region, and the ethics of partnering with state-run museums and organisations in the country.