The National Gallery is extending its scheme allowing visitors to major exhibitions to pay as little as £1 entrance to a third show opening this autumn.
The gallery’s pay what you wish initiative, which was launched as a response to the cost of living crisis, will apply to its exhibition of Frans Hals works opening on 30 September.
Visitors to the gallery’s exhibitions of Lucian Freud paintings last year, and After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, which closed at the weekend, had the option to pay a minimum of £1 on Friday evenings.
According to the gallery’s data, more than one in five pay-what-you-want visitors to both shows were visiting a fee-charging exhibition for the first time. About one in 20 visitors using the scheme were visiting the National Gallery for the first time.
Almost four in 10 visitors to After Impressionism who used the scheme attributed their decision to the cost of living crisis. Twenty-one per cent were aged 35 to 44 – an increase of 11 percentage points on the overall gallery average in the 2022-23 financial year.
Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, said: “While our collection and most of our temporary exhibitions are free, the pay what you wish scheme continues to enable practically anyone who wants to see our paying exhibitions to do so.”
Frans Hals was a 17th-century Dutch portraitist, best known for painting the citizens of Haarlem, where he worked for most of his life, and his group portraits.
He brought “an incisive characterisation and an unparalleled sense of animation” to his portraits, the National Gallery says on its website.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art says of him: “Hals has been placed second only to Rembrandt and, during the past 100 years, to Vermeer in the pantheon of great Dutch painters of the Golden Age.” He is noted for his “often colourful palette and above all his bold brushwork”.
Booking for the Frans Hals exhibition opens on 16 August. Timed slots are available from 5.30pm to 9pm on Fridays under the pay what you wish scheme.
