The light is different in the gallery at half past seven. The overhead fixtures that illuminate the Meridian Hall during the day are supplemented, in the evening hours, by a warmer secondary system — gallery Director Simone Aldair’s concession to the fact that Hargrove’s paintings, which are studies in natural light, deserve something gentler than fluorescence after dark.

The result, on Thursday evening, was a gallery that felt like a different institution. Smaller. Warmer. The timed-entry system that marshals daytime crowds into orderly 90-minute windows was relaxed — visitors entered freely, stayed as long as they wished, and moved through the exhibition at a pace that suggested contemplation rather than pilgrimage.

Approximately 280 people visited during the extended Thursday hours, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. This is a fraction of the 1,200 to 1,500 who pass through on a typical Saturday afternoon. But the Thursday crowd was not a diluted version of the daytime crowd. It was a different crowd entirely.

The Sketchers

In the Greymoor room — the central gallery where Hargrove’s highland landscapes hang in three rows, lit to echo the diffuse illumination she paints — two young women sat on the bench with sketchbooks open, drawing.

They were Lise Grahn, 22, and Petra Innes, 21, second-year students at the Bobington Polytechnic’s school of applied arts. They had been in the gallery for nearly two hours when this correspondent found them, and their sketchbooks were full of studies: the sweep of Hargrove’s brushwork in “November Light, Greymoor,” the tonal gradations in “Ridgeline at Dusk,” the peculiar way Hargrove renders fog as if it were solid.

“You can’t learn this from reproductions,” said Grahn, who is studying illustration. “The reproductions show you what the painting looks like. Being here shows you how she built it. The layers. The way she works the paint. You have to see it in person.”

Innes, who is studying textile design, was sketching the colour palette rather than the compositions — strips of colour arranged in sequences that corresponded to the bands of light in Hargrove’s landscapes.

“I’m not painting these,” Innes said. “I’m weaving them. The colour relationships in the Greymoor paintings would make extraordinary textiles. I don’t know if Hargrove would approve, but I suspect she wouldn’t care.”

Aldair, observing the sketchers, said the Thursday evenings had been introduced specifically to welcome this kind of engagement. “The daytime experience is wonderful, but it is crowded. The evening is for the people who want to sit with the paintings. Students, artists, people who come back a third or fourth time. The exhibition has become a civic event. On Thursday evenings, it remembers that it is also an art exhibition.”

The Numbers

Total attendance at the Hargrove retrospective has now reached approximately 43,800 after twenty days — a pace that will surpass the Matthias Crane memorial exhibition (68,000 visitors over eight weeks in 2009) well before the retrospective closes on 30 June.

The Arts Council’s “exceptional cultural significance” classification, announced Thursday, has generated interest from two national lending institutions in contributing additional Hargrove works to the exhibition. Aldair confirmed that discussions were under way but declined to specify which works or which lenders.

“If we can expand the exhibition, we will,” Aldair said. “But carefully. What we have is already remarkable. We will not dilute it to inflate a number.”

Hargrove, as is her custom, had no comment. The paintings, as is theirs, said everything.