Smaller galleries show their best assets

They hope to boost public enthusiasm further with a new series of exhibitions highlighting the best of their collections. Details will be revealed today in a joint announcement by the directors of the Courtauld Gallery, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection.

The Courtauld, which is marking its 75th anniversary, is expected to easily pass 125,000 visitors this year, up from 111,039 last year.

Dulwich's attendances have risen from a typical 100,000 a year to 115,000 and then 142,000 last year. The Wallace Collection's latest annual attendance figures were 330,000. A decade ago, the gallery was predicting it would have 320,000 visitors a year within three decades and that the annual total would never pass 350,000.

Ros Savill, the Wallace's director, said: "It's thrilling because finally we're reaching the kind of visitor numbers that we weren't expecting to reach until 2025. What we can do as smaller museums is attract people on a slightly different basis. We're not going to do a great blockbuster like our larger counterparts but we can use our tiny space as well as possible. We can be tiny, but we can be excellent."

Ian Dejardin, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, said its size meant it could mount exhibitions that would not attract enough people to be viable for the bigger institutions.

He added: "We all share these amazing collections and, in my case, I'm very keen to make people more aware of them."

Dulwich's new programme includes an exhibition bringing together nearly all surviving paintings by Guido Reni of St Sebastian to show alongside its own example. "For our founders, it was probably the most important painting in the gallery, so focusing on that is very important for us," said Mr Dejardin.

It will also show work by Jan de Bray and his father Salomon, two important though now overshadowed Dutch painters. "The National Gallery should be doing it but won't because the de Brays are a little-known name," said Mr Dejardin.

"But it fits us perfectly because we take artists whose reputations have fallen a bit."

The Courtauld's exhibitions include Renoir at the theatre, using its famous painting La Loge as a centrepiece. It is also presenting its entire collection of works by Paul Cézanne for the first time.

The Wallace Collection is borrowing pieces from the Louvre bequeathed by Louis La Caze, a French collector and contemporary of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, whose art is a cornerstone of today's Wallace Collection.

It is also borrowing two of the greatest French paintings of the 18th century, Lady Taking Tea by Jean-Siméon Chardin and A Lady On Her Day Bed by François Boucher, to show alongside its own great French works of the period.