Botticelli to Van Gogh exhibition sees 200,975 people come through National Gallery of Australia's doors

The exhibition was the largest and most attended at the National Gallery of Australia in the past decade with 200,975 people visiting the exhibition.

The record for the most visitors to an exhibition at the National Gallery was 2010's Masterpieces from Paris: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond which saw 476,212 people.

Final visitors walked through the exhibition on Monday, after the gallery put on an extra 64 additional sessions in Botticelli to Van Gogh's final weeks. The remainder of these sessions sold out ahead of schedule on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the institution said despite knowing the exhibition would be big, they did not expect it to be a sellout, particularly considering the uncertainty Covid placed on visitor numbers.

Along with the restrictions placed on the exhibition by the pandemic, the National Gallery also had to work within a lighting level cap.

This meant that the exhibition could only be open to the public, and under lights, for a certain number of hours every week to help protect the works, some of which are more than 500 years old.

Among those seeing Botticelli to Van Gogh in its final day was Canberra's Richard Cabrita and Kim Bryant, who were both struck by the vibrancy of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.

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While they had previously seen photographs of the work - and have now taken their own - they said it didn't compare to the real deal, which appeared to glow.

"I don't know how he did it. It was almost as if he ground up glow worms in the paint. The photos just don't do it justice," Mr Cabrita said.

"The exhibition is a once in a lifetime type opportunity. You don't get to see works like these very often.

"It was good to see a good cross-section. I was a little disappointed that there was only one Monet and one van Gogh, but what we saw was excellent.

"There are just really vibrant colours and those colours have lasted throughout the years."

Botticelli to Van Gogh not only marked the gallery's first blockbuster since the pandemic but also the first time in the almost 200-year history of the National Gallery, London, that an exhibition has toured internationally.

Spanning 400 years, the exhibition included 61 paintings by some of Europe's most revered artists, names like Botticelli, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet and van Gogh.

While the number of notable works in the exhibition - including Rembrandt's Self Portrait at the Age of 34, Botticelli's Early Life of Saint Zenobius, Monet's The Water-Lily Pond and Vermeer's A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal - has seen the show be described as a crash course in art history, it was van Gogh's much-loved Sunflowers that captured the imagination of the public.

"Just the thought of so many years ago, these artists were painting. the Self Portrait by Rembrandt was interesting," Ms Bryant said.

"How did he do a self portrait? Were there mirrors? Did he look in the mirror? Or was it a shiny piece of silver?"

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