National Gallery to stay open overnight to meet huge demand for Van Gogh exhibition
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The National Gallery’s Van Gogh: Poets And Lovers exhibition is set to pull an all-nighter during its closing weekend in response to a surge in demand for tickets. The announcement follows the display becoming the third most popular paid exhibition in the London attraction's history - with more than 280,000 people visiting the show from its launch date on September 14, 2024, to January 7, 2025.
Tickets for the extra night-time viewing slots on January 17 went on sale on Thursday, January 9. National Gallery members are able to visit the exhibition, which closes on 19 January, free of charge. Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, expressed that the decision provided an opportunity to experience the gallery at the kind of times that artists, including Francis Bacon and David Hockney, were known to have enjoyed visiting.
Sir Finaldi said: “I am delighted that over 200,000 people have visited Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers and we look forward to welcoming more people to the exhibition as it comes to its final weeks. “As part of our opening for the last weekend, our visitors will have the rare and special opportunity to experience Van Gogh’s pictures during the night and early hours of the morning following in the footsteps of artists such as Freud, Bacon and Hockney, who came here during those times to take inspiration from the gallery’s collection.”.
The exhibition is the gallery's first devoted to Vincent Van Gogh, and is also the first anywhere to focus on the artist's imaginative transformations, featuring more than 60 works and loans from museums and private collections around the world - it has been dubbed a “once in a century” display.
