Alex Harris stood in front of the six abstract bronze figures named "The Bathers" by the artist who created them: Pablo Picasso.
Harris, who is 8, held up the photo of the sculpture from the brochure for the epic "Picasso" exhibition that ended Sunday evening at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Then he went to the back of the room — the last of 11 containing works from the Musée National Picasso in Paris — before he solved a puzzle in his mind. What looked like an arrow through the head of one figure in the brochure actually was the spread arms of another figure in the rear.
Alex, from Moseley in Chesterfield County, summed up his Picasso experience: "Confusing, but cool."
"And clever," added Zach Harris, his 10-year-old brother.
The brothers were among the last 300 people allowed to view the exhibition after a run that began Feb. 19 and attracted 229,729 people in its three-month run.
"It's far and away our record," museum spokeswoman Suzanne Hall said after the last visitor had left Sunday.
The run ended with a three-day marathon that drew more than 26,000 people to the museum, which stayed open until midnight Friday and Saturday. People signed up in half-hour shifts of 300 to view the exhibition, drawn from Picasso's personal collection, now housed in Paris.
"This is really something else to have all this art in one place," marveled Sharon Stanley, who came with friends from Washington to visit the museum for the first time. "It saves you an airline ticket to Paris."
Rabbi Chaim Silver and friend Robert Block came from Norfolk for their first visit to the museum. Normally, they go to Washington for art, as well as Norfolk's Chrysler Museum.
"We never thought about coming to Richmond," Block said. "Maybe we should come here more often."
Silver was musing over Picasso, the man and the artist, after finishing the show and returning to the room featuring paintings from 1915 to 1924, including portraits painted in a more conventional style than other periods.
He admired "Paulo as a Harlequin" and "Portrait of Olga in an Armchair" but shuddered at "Seated Woman," whose limbs are outsized to her body.
"The lady has to go to the emergency room quickly," Silver said.
Federico Venegas, on the other hand, had nothing but praise for his idol.
"I love it. I've been here two hours," said Venegas, a 17-year-old student at Charlottesville High School who said he is working on a painting in the same style as "Celestina," from Picasso's Blue Period.
"I wanted to finally see it in person," he said. "It's an honor."
The final day of the exhibition attracted people from near as well as far, some coming for a second or more time.
Morgan Engel of Richmond had toured the exhibition several weeks ago, but she returned with her children — Brendon, 6, and Isabel, 8, who was sporting a bright yellow cast on her broken left arm.
Like a number of people attending Sunday, Engel had tried to get tickets the previous day.
"Most of my friends have come to it at least once," the West End resident said. "I think it's a great thing for the city of Richmond."
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