Assistant director Adam Worrall said, ''We are absolutely delighted with the attendance to date. We expect that this weekend we will have our 200,000th visitor which is slightly ahead of where we expected to be at this stage. That makes it so far the highest-attended exhibition we have had in the last decade.''

Despite parking problems due to extensive renovations, and long queues, the gallery expects a quarter of a million visitors to view the show, which features 112 of some of the best-known works of modern art borrowed from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, while it undergoes its own renovations.

''Parking has become more of an issue but we haven't had that many complaints from visitors because we do have a person rostered on through the whole week to help visitors find a park in the parliamentary triangle in the busy part of the week.

''But most of our visitors are still coming on the weekends when parking isn't really a problem around the gallery,'' he said.

''We still have an ambitious target of 250,000 visitors for the exhibition in total, so we are on target to meet that which will then surpass Monet & Japan (2001), which was the last biggest show in recent years with 227,000 visitors,'' he said.

For more on the exhibition, see today's Canberra Times.