Yet the official number is not what it appears to be. Buried in the final count is a secret that the Art Museum disclosed only after fierce resistance - that only a little less than half of those 305,883 visitors, or 149,018, actually saw the Delacroix show.
The larger number represents the total number of visitors to the museum during the public run of the exhibition, Sept. 15 to Jan. 3 (the show opened to museum members on Sept. 1).
Is this - conflating the total attendance, or ``gate,'' with the number of people who attend a particular blockbuster show - common practice? Has the Philadelphia Museum of Art done this before?
The official figure not only inflates the popularity of the Delacroix show, it calls into question the validity of a recently released economic impact study commissioned by the museum. Based on 305,883 visitors, the study calculates that ``Delacroix'' generated more than $39 million in spending for the city.
Numbers can be made to sing a variety of songs, and museum officials don't see anything odd in measuring a special exhibition by counting everyone who comes into the building. They have said they believe that ``building counts'' offer a more meaningful assessment of a single exhibition's impact on the institution and on the city, and that such figures are also more useful for planning and other internal needs.
This was demonstrated, the officials say, by the Cezanne retrospective two years ago. ``Cezanne'' was by far the most popular show at the museum. The building count was 777,810 visitors, while the exhibition total was 548,741 - the maximum number of people who could have seen the show given the number of tickets available.
