Whether they were lured by Holbein and Hogarth, or the more contemporary charms of Gilbert and George, Bruce Naumann and five corkscrewing slides, a record 7.7 million people visited Tate last year.

Attendance at the four galleries in London, St Ives and Liverpool was 20 per cent up on the previous financial year.

Important retrospectives on Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Gustav Klimt will among the hightlights of the 2007-8 seasons at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool respectively.

Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate director, said: “Tate has had an incredible year, with its highest attendance figures ever. In six years we have trebled our audiences.”

A decade ago when the London Tate had two million visitors to a single building in Pimlico no one could have predicted that it could equal the four to five million attendances at the British Museum and National Gallery, he said. The creation of Tate Modern and the growing appetite for contemporary art had made that possible.

But he cautioned that the gallery was operating in a difficult financial climate, relying heavily on generating its own revenue from shop sales and catering, and on sponsorship.

“We are dependent on private funding to a greater extent than almost any other national museum or gallery,” he said, adding that continued core funding from the Government was crucial.

From a British perspective, the Bacon retrospective promises to be a highlight of 2008’s art calendar. The Tate Britain show opening in October next year will be the most significant exhibition on the artist since his death in 1992.

Tate Modern was already the world’s most visited free modern art gallery, but this year it set a new record attendance of 5.2 million, well above the 4.7 million who revelled in the soaring unfamiliar space of the Turbine Hall when the converted power station first opened as an art gallery in 2000. From September 2008 to February 2009 it will present another juggernaut: Mark Rothko, the American painter whose White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) became the most expensive contemporary work of art to change hands at auction when it sold for $70 million (£35 million) in May.

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