Louvre retains its place as the most-visited art museum in the world

The Covid-19 pandemic shook up the artwork world, however nothing can shake the Musée du Louvre’s grip on the highest of our customer figures survey. Yearly we ask the world’s artwork museums what number of guests they acquired over the previous 12 months, and yearly the Louvre comes out on prime. 

The Louvre reported receiving 7,726,321 guests in 2022. Whereas that is down 20% on the 9.6 million individuals who visited in 2019, it’s 173% up on 2021. The Louvre acquired over 2.5 million extra guests than the second-placed establishment in our survey, the Vatican Museums.

Certainly, whereas museums elsewhere are struggling to regain their pre-pandemic guests, the Louvre has determined to restrict numbers to make sure a tolerable expertise. They’ve determined to restrict day by day entries to 30,000, which ought to stabilise attendance at between 7.5 million and eight.5 million in 2023. That is much like the extent the museum skilled 17 years in the past, and a giant drop from the over 10 million who visited in 2018.

Different Paris museums additionally carried out strongly in our survey. The Musée d’Orsay got here sixth with 3.3 million guests, simply 10% down on 2019. The Centre Pompidou got here ninth with 3 million, simply 8% down. The Musée de l’Orangerie and the Musée du Quai Branly have been each additionally inside 10% of their 2019 determine.

Some French establishments even did higher than earlier than the pandemic. The Fondation Louis Vuitton noticed its figures rise by a 3rd, from simply over one million in 2019 to virtually 1.4 million final 12 months, helped by its blockbuster exhibition of the Morozov Assortment, which had a staggering 1.2 million guests. The Petit Palais jumped by 14% to 1.1 million.

Historic homes and palaces usually are not included in our checklist, however the Palace of Versailles welcomed 6.9 million guests in 2022.

The Louvre solely retained its primary spot in 2021 resulting from a statistical quirk. Chinese language state-run museums report their customer numbers too late to be included in our survey. If that they had, then the Louvre would have been toppled by the Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou, which acquired 3.8 million guests in 2021. However with strict zero-Covid guidelines affecting Chinese language customer numbers, that’s prone to have been a one off.