National Gallery opens late

The National Gallery is to stay open late at weekends for the first time in an effort to cope with the crowds it expects for its latest exhibition.

When Vermeer and the Delft School opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this year, visitors queued around the block. In total, 545,000 saw the exhibition and the National is hoping the show will prove equally popular in London.

The gallery, which has previously only stayed open late on a Wednesday, will keep its doors open until 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The exhibition will run for three months - as it did in New York - and will have a maximum capacity of 270,000.

The gallery says Vermeer's closely observed domestic scenes needed quiet study, and that the number of visitors would be capped at 3,000 a day.

The artist David Hockney was given a private view at the National Gallery this week and described the exhibition as "fabulous".

National Gallery - details