The queue, for the first time, had a system.

Thursday’s introduction of timed entry at the Royal Bobington Gallery’s Hargrove retrospective — a measure announced last weekend in response to crowds that had begun wrapping around Arundel Crescent and impeding pedestrian traffic on Mercer Street — brought a new rhythm to the exhibition that its thirty-five-thousandth-and-something visitor would recognise as both necessary and, in a small way, regrettable.

The gallery is now issuing entry tickets in ninety-minute windows, available from the front desk or by written application. Visitors are admitted in groups of forty at twelve-minute intervals. The flow is managed by two additional staff stationed at the entrance to Meridian Hall. The effect is a viewing experience that is calmer, more spacious, and significantly less likely to result in someone’s elbow in your ribs during the Greymoor landscapes.

“We had to do something,” said Gallery Director Simone Aldair. “The exhibition was designed for contemplation, not for crowds three deep at every canvas. The paintings deserve better. The visitors deserve better.”

Attendance through Wednesday evening — the latest figure available — stood at approximately 35,400. The exhibition has been open for thirteen days. At its current pace, it will surpass the 2009 Matthias Crane memorial show (68,000 visitors over eight weeks) well before its scheduled close on the 30th of June.

A Different Crowd on Wednesdays

The new Wednesday evening openings, extended from the existing free-admission Wednesday programme, have drawn a noticeably different audience from the weekend crowds. This correspondent observed the first extended session, which ran until nine o’clock.

The evening visitors were younger, on the whole, and quieter. Several had come directly from work — coats still damp, bags under arms. A man in a mechanic’s coveralls stood for nine full minutes before “November Light, Greymoor” (2011), the painting that recently sold privately for forty-five thousand florins. He was not, one suspects, calculating its market value.

A woman with two children — a girl of perhaps ten and a boy somewhat younger — led them methodically through the early works, explaining each painting in terms this critic found both accurate and enviably clear. “She painted what the light was doing,” the woman said. “Not what the hill looked like. The light.”

The boy considered this. “Can you paint light?” he asked.

“Look at it,” his mother said. “She did.”

It was, I confess, a better piece of criticism than I have managed in thirty years of the profession.

The Hargrove Effect

The exhibition’s gravitational pull continues to reshape the Gallery’s operations and, to a modest degree, the cultural economy of the neighbourhood. Rensler’s coffee house on Threadneedle Street reported its busiest Wednesday in memory. The bookshop on Mercer Street has placed a Hargrove monograph — published in 2014 and long out of print — in its window with a sign reading “Enquire Within,” which one may safely interpret as meaning they haven’t got any copies either.

Aldair confirmed that the Arts Council had sent an observer to assess the exhibition’s impact, a visit she described as “routine” in a tone that suggested it was anything but. The Council’s pending decision on an emergency heritage grant for the Bellvue Theatre — a separate matter, but one watched keenly by the arts community — may be influenced by the demonstration that Bobington’s cultural institutions can command extraordinary public engagement.

Hargrove herself has not visited the Gallery since the opening reception and has issued no further public statements since her letter of the 19th of February, in which she decried the “carnival of auction-house arithmetic” around her work. The paintings, she implied then, are sufficient commentary.

On the evidence of Thursday’s timed-entry queues — orderly, patient, extending past the Royal Institute and along Arundel Crescent in the late afternoon — the public agrees.

The exhibition continues through the 30th of June. Admission is eight florins; concessions four. Wednesdays remain free. Timed entry tickets are available from the Gallery’s front desk from ten o’clock daily.