Infiltrating the usual suspects on the list of international museum attendance numbers compiled by the The Art Newspaper is a new museum that has enticed visitors to its rural corner of the world. Placed with the likes of the Louvre, the world’s most popular museum, with 9.7 million visitors, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which drew 6.1 million people, was the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Opened in late 2011 in Bentonville, Ark., by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, the fresh destination hosted 565,488 visitors in its first full year, more than double the number the museum expected.

An exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles brought in needed numbers for the beleaguered museum, which has gone through a rough patch with a new director, staff changes, board resignations, and rumors of a merger. In 2012, 218,558 visitors, the strongest number in a decade, came in, probably in repsonse to the 2011 blockbuster “Art in the Streets” show which drew more than 200,000 visitors.

The single most popular exhibition of the year was reportedly the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s loan show of Old Masters from the Mauritshuis – featuring Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” – which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day. The ever-popular painting is now on loan to the de Young Museum in San Francisco.