Today, Seattle Art Museum released a study by the University of Washington's William Beyers estimating the business activity generated by this winter's landmark Picasso exhibition.

There are non-surprises in the study: The show made more dough than any other at the museum ever, since it drew more people: 405,000. The museum sold 17,000 new household memberships, raising the total to 48,000. We knew those things in January when the show closed.

But new notables include: 51 percent of the show's visitors were from outside King County—of that, 18 percent were out-of-state and 9 percent from other countries (mainly Canada). More than a third (35 percent) of all the visitors to Picasso had never been to the museum before.

The rest of the press release read like mumbo-jumbo to me, especially the part where SAM claims that the show "resulted in the creation of 936 jobs," so I called Beyers. If you see that claim being passed around elsewhere, don't buy it—that's just a mistake in the release, Beyers said. The 936 figure is the number of jobs that were touched in some way by the show—security guards at the museum, curators, nearby store owners, the waiter who brought the dinner to the museum patron after her visit, the restaurant owner who bought the meat, the farmer who raised the cow, the...

Here are some numbers you can take to the bank: The total business activity was $66 million throughout Washington State, $58 million of which was in King County. Tax revenues were $3.1 million statewide, $2.9 due to business activity directly in King County.

People spent a total of $23 million to attend Picasso: $6 million on admissions, $5.2 million on food and beverages, $4.2 million on lodging, $4.4 million on travel, $1.1 million on souvenirs, $900,000 on parking and entertainment. The average patron spent $60 on the visit.

SAM spent $11.5 million locally to mount the show, the largest chunk of that ($7.1 million) being labor. SAM employed an average of 332 people in the downtown museum over the course of the exhibition.

The next three largest-grossing shows at SAM were Impressionism (1999, 316,000 visitors, $24 million in King County), Van Gogh to Mondrian (2004, 262,000 visitors, $22.4 million in King County), Leonardo Lives (1997, 235,000 visitors, $15.5 million in King County). (Overall Washington State impacts were not calculated for those.)

Picasso's still on tour: It's at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond now, and goes to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco this summer.