Global Visitor Statistics — What Each Country Looks At

Every artwork in our catalogue is tagged with a “vibe” — the mood it gives off, such as Calm, Bold, Romantic or Dramatic. Each spider-web below belongs to one country and has eight arms, one per mood.

The further an arm stretches, the bigger the share of that country's visits going to art of that mood. The grey outline behind it is the worldwide average. So wherever the coloured shape pushes out past the grey outline, that country likes that mood more than the rest of the world does; wherever it sinks inside, it likes it less.

This is the same idea as the fingerprints above, but measured on a different label. “Vibe” describes the style or atmosphere of a picture; “emotional tone” describes the feeling it carries — Joyful, Melancholic, Hopeful, Mysterious, Somber, and so on.

Read it exactly the same way: coloured shape is the country, grey outline is the worldwide average, and any arm reaching past the grey is a feeling that country seeks out more than everyone else.

Each row is a country, each column an art movement (Impressionism, Baroque, Surrealism…). The number in a box compares that country with the world: it is how many times more often — or less often — that country opens art from that movement than the average visitor does.

A value of 1 means “exactly the world average”. Above 1 means the country favours that movement, below 1 means it largely ignores it. Colour repeats the same information so the pattern is visible without reading every number:

Boxes with a dash have too few visits to give a trustworthy answer. To keep the table readable we only show movements followed by at least 5 countries, and countries with readable numbers for at least 5 movements.

Each horizontal bar is one country, cut into coloured blocks. The blocks run from the oldest art on the left (Medieval) to the newest on the right (Contemporary), and the width of a block is the share of that country's visits spent on art from that era.

Every bar totals 100%, so this compares proportions, not popularity — a small country and a large one can be read side by side. Countries are ordered by how old their taste is on average: the ones at the top lean towards older art, the ones at the bottom towards modern and contemporary art. The top bar is the worldwide mix, for reference.

The same “vibe” moods as the first chart, drawn on a map. Each country is painted with the single mood that takes the largest share of its visits. The key below uses five clearly different colours — one for each of the five moods that lead in the most countries — with anything rarer grouped into a grey “Other”; the number in brackets is how many countries that colour covers.

Hover a country to see that share as a percentage, plus its runners-up. Grey countries are not missing from the data — they simply have not opened enough different artworks yet for a fair answer, so we say nothing rather than guess.

Every dot is a country, placed by the average colours of the art its visitors open. Left to right is brightness: dots on the left favour darker, shadowed paintings, dots on the right favour lighter, luminous ones. Bottom to top is colour intensity: low means muted and restrained, high means strong and vivid.

The dashed cross marks the worldwide average, so a dot up and to the right likes art both brighter and more vivid than the world does. Bigger dots simply mean more visits were measured. Countries sit very close together here, so a name is only printed where it fits without covering a neighbour — hover any dot to read its country and its two exact values.

Note on the scales: brightness is measured from 0 (pure black) to 1 (pure white), and intensity from 0 (fully muted) through 0.5 (balanced) to 1 (vivid). National averages never come close to those extremes — they crowd into a narrow band — so the chart zooms into the range the data actually occupies. The axis numbers are therefore real values, but the visible span is much smaller than the full theoretical 0–1 scale.

For each of the busiest countries, the ten artists its visitors pay the most attention to. Attention is weighted by how much effort the action takes: simply opening a page counts 1, saving to favourites 5, configuring a purchase 10, and adding to the cart 25. Each visitor is only counted once per kind of action, so one enthusiast cannot inflate an artist.

The badge next to a name is that artist's rank worldwide, on a five-colour scale from globally famous to purely local:

A blue or green badge therefore means the whole world agrees with that country, while an artist ranked far down the world list — or outside the top 200 entirely — is a genuinely local favourite. The (N) badge marks an artist born in that same country, so you can see at a glance how much of a country's taste is patriotic.

This measures patriotism in taste. For each country we take the share of its visits that go to artists born in that same country, then compare it with the share the whole world gives those same artists.

A bar sitting on the 1 line means no bias at all: that country treats its own artists exactly as the rest of the world treats them. The further right the bar goes, the more strongly the country over-favours artists born at home. The comparison against the world average is what makes this fair — countries whose artists are famous everywhere are not credited with bias they do not have.

The scale is logarithmic, so each step right is a multiplication rather than an addition. Countries with too little data, or with too few artists in our catalogue to compare against, are left out.

Artists are grouped by when they were born, in half-centuries. Each coloured line follows one country across those generations, and its height is the share of that country's visits going to artists born in that period. The grey line is the worldwide pattern.

Where a country's line rises above the grey one, that country is unusually attached to artists of that generation; where it dips below, that generation leaves it cold.

Every other chart measures what people look at. This one measures what people look at compared with what we actually have on the shelf, movement by movement.

For each art movement we work out how much of our catalogue carries a given mood, then how much of that movement's visits go to that mood. The number in the box is the second divided by the first. A value of 1 means visitors take that mood exactly as often as we offer it. Above 1 means they actively seek it out; below 1 means they pass it by even though we stock plenty of it.

Dashes mark combinations with too little data to judge. As with the movement table, we only keep movements showing at least 5 readable moods, and moods that appear in at least 5 movements.

A three-dimensional field of bars. Weeks run along one edge and historical eras along the other, so each era has its own row rather than being stacked on top of its neighbours. The height of a bar is that era's share of the visits for that week, and taller bars are also lighter in colour.

Because the eras are laid out side by side instead of piled up, a quiet era stays readable next to a dominant one, and a week where taste genuinely shifted shows up as a change in the shape of the landscape. Drag to rotate the view, scroll to zoom.