Portrait gallery’s visitor counter lacks a head for numbers

Relief for bosses of beleaguered institution as significant drop in visits is explained by tech error

WHEN the National Portrait Gallery admitted an astonishing 49 per cent drop in its annual visitor numbers, it seemed a cause for deep concern for the beleaguered institution.

That figure, it has now emerged, was not entirely the result of unpopular exhibitions and vanishing numbers of tourists, but a hi-tech counting system that could not count.

The gallery, in common with other London museums, reported a significant drop in figures over the past two years. The fall, reported to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, could have had repercussions in an already “challenging year” for the gallery’s finances and a round of redundancies.

But yesterday the gallery stated the apparently severe drop in numbers had come from a system operated by Ipsos Retail Performance “significantly undercounting”, with a revised figure showing a smaller drop of around 19 per cent. The error, reported in the Art Newspaper, was uncovered when staff noticed more visitors appeared to be attending the BP Portrait Award exhibition, where they were counted manually, than the entire gallery.

An investigation found problems with the automatic system, which was based on infrared and optical sensors and used at the main entrance.

Further inquiries showed that the problem dated back to April last year, with the system failing an audit the following July. That audit, which compared figures from the system with a manual count, was passed by IRP.

A gallery spokesman said: “The National Portrait Gallery has revised its reported visitor figures for the period April 24 2017 to Aug 3 2018, after an investigation revealed the gallery’s footfall counting system, operated by IRP, was significantly undercounting visitors at the main entrance.”

For the financial year 2017-18, the gallery was initially told it had received 1,072,377 visitors: a 49 per cent drop on 2015-16, when 2,102,975 people arrived through the doors. In fact, the revised visitor count showed 1,691,547 visitors came to gallery in 2017-18, a drop of just 19 per cent in two years.

The Art Newspaper noted: “The gallery has had to endure the negative publicity that followed press reports about the dramatic drop in visitors, impacting on its reputation.”

A spokesman for IRP said it was working with the gallery to adjust the under-reported visitor numbers and to prevent it happening again.

The National Gallery, Tate and the British Museum have all seen visitor numbers fall. It was reported this month that galleries had held crisis talks, believing numbers to be down because of people unwilling to travel to London, security fears and a lack of “blockbuster” exhibitions.

Separately, the portrait gallery’s annual report admitted “challenging” financial circumstances, with ticket income down from £3 million to £2.6 million and 32 job losses.

It looked like a crisis on Mount Olympus. The National Portrait Gallery had mislaid around a million visitors in just two years. Concerns about terrorism and increased travel costs were blamed. Heads rolled: 32 staff were made redundant or agreed to leave. One of the jewels of London’s museum estate appeared, from a particular angle, to resemble a skull. Yet it turns out this calamity was an optical illusion. Special sensors installed by a company to track visitors had been systematically undercounting them in comparison to a manual count. Perhaps they were programmed by Impressionists or, worse, Cubists. The modern world makes a great fetish of measuring everything, but sometimes its methods make the mirror that art holds up to life look positively spotless.