The Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition, which closed on June 4, is most successful in the institution’s history with 650,000 visitors.

Tickets for the show, which started on February 10, sold out quickly and the museum was twice prompted to extend visiting hours in an effort to meet demand.

Seven of the 28 works at the start of the show had never been exhibited in the Netherlands before.

“The Rijksmuseum is grateful for the generous loans from museums around the world that enabled it to bring together more works by Vermeer than ever before,” museum director Taco Dibbits said after the show had closed.

Over half the visitors came from the Netherlands, with France, Germay, Britain, the US and Belgium completing the top five list of foreign tourists, the Rijksmuseum said.

Two paintings from the show – The Girl in the Red Hat (National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Young Woman at the Virginal (The Leiden Collection, New York) – will remain in the museum’s gallery of honour until October, alongside four Vermeer’s from the Rijksmuseum’s own collection.

The Girl with the Pearl Earring which was also lent to the Rijksmuseum for part of the exhibition, can be viewed at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

The museum’s previous best-selling exhibition was Late Rembrandt in 2015 which welcomed over 520,000 people.