2015 was a big year for galleries, museums

The National Gallery and the three major museums in Ottawa-Gatineau have seen big gains in attendance in 2015, with one of their busiest weeks still to come. Even before they’re deluged with kids and many parents on Christmas breaks over the coming days, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum have all exceeded their visitor numbers for 2014.

The numbers come as vindication for two museum directors who had been caught up in a show of postelection muscle by the Trudeau government.

The government had been demanding that Meg Beckel, at the Museum of Nature, and Mark O’Neill, who oversees the History and War museums, voluntarily renounce reappointments made by the Harper government before the directors’ current terms ended.

This week, however, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly has called off the dogs of expedient propriety and told Beckel and O’Neill their jobs are secure.

Had the government not changed its position, the numbers showing booming attendance at the museums would have been inconvenient evidence of the directors doing their jobs rather too well.

The biggest increase at any of the federal cultural institutions in 2015 was at the National Gallery. Preliminary data show that, to mid-December, the gallery drew approximately 375,000 visitors, a huge increase over the 2014 total of 270,208. If the gallery attracts, say, 10,000 more visitors in the second half of December, the year-over-year increase could top 40 per cent.

Further, as the 2014 total was a marked increase over the previous year’s 241,173 visitors, it indicates that the gallery is gradually reversing a decade-plus decline in attendance.

Meanwhile, over at the Museum of Nature, “we are at 471,000 year to date, but we expect about another 10,000 before (the) New Year, so we forecast to be at about 480,000 for the year,” says marketing director John Swettenham. “That is a very good year for us indeed.”

The jump represents an almost 19-per-cent increase in visitors to the museum over the total reached in 2014 — which, in turn, was a nine-per-cent increase over 2013.

At the War Museum, to the end of November, total visitation was 490,448, up from 424,448 in 2014, an increase of almost 16 per cent.

At the Museum of History, the number of visitors to the end of November was 1,045,000, up from 973,296 last year, an increase of more than seven per cent.

The increases all around reflect 2015’s bumper crop of popular exhibitions at the federally funded cultural landmarks. The National Gallery’s big summer show of works by the late Alex Coville was a hit, as were shows by M.C. Escher, Marc Chagall and, currently, by impressionist master Claude Monet. (Monet: A Bridge to Modernity continues to Feb. 15.)

Spokeswoman Josée-Britanie Mallet also credited the Contemporary Conversations series, which was organized with the United States embassy and U.S. State Department and brought in big-name American artists, including Eric Fischl and Nick Cave. (The series will be repeated in 2016, with artists yet to be announced.)

The Museum of Nature scored audience gains with its creepycrawly exhibit Bugs, which continues to March 27, and earlier with Body Worlds: Animals Inside Out.

The Museum of History saw much interest in The Greeks: From Alexander the Great to Agamemnon, and with The Vikings, which continues to April 17.

The exhibition Death and Glory: Gladiators and the Colosseum drew strong numbers to the War Museum, and spokeswoman Patricia Lynch also cites “the many activities around Remembrance Day.”

John Swettenham gives a portion of the credit for increased attendance to Ottawa Tourism, and its television-Internet ads that targeted prospective visitors in Montreal and Toronto.

It’s also likely that the plunging Canadian dollar lured more American tourists to Ottawa, while it encouraged more Canadians to vacation in their own country rather than abroad.