National Gallery Gets New Director
Scholar Nicholas Penny to Return to London from Washington, D.C.
Nicholas Penny will be leaving Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art to become the new Director of London's National Gallery.
London's prestigious National Gallery announced on December 3, 2007 that Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, approved the appointment of Dr. Nicholas Penny as its Director by the museum's Board of Trustees. The scholar will hopefully assume his duties in February 2008. Penny replaces Dr. Charles Robert Saumarez Smith. After a somewhat contentious five-year term, he left the National Gallery in August 2007 to run London's Royal Academy of Arts.
Reacting to the announcement of his new position, Nicholas Penny said, “It is an honour to be invited by the Trustees to return to the National Gallery as its Director. Few institutions enjoy such popular affection within Britain or such esteem abroad."
Penny's Career: Professor, Curator and Author
Having obtained his doctorate from the prestigious Courtauld Institute, Nicholas Penny (b. 1949) began his academic career as a lecturer in art history at the University of Manchester. He was subsequently the Ashmolean Museum's Keeper of the Department of Western Art. From 1990 to 2000, Penny was the National Gallery's Clore Curator of Renaissance Painting. Since 2002, he's been the Senior Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he's also held the post of Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the museum's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
Dr. Penny is the esteemed author of many books and articles on painting and sculpture as well as the history of collecting and taste. His titles include Church Monuments in Romantic England (1977), Reynolds (1986), Piranesi (1988), The Materials of Sculpture (1996) and Frames (1997). He co-authored Raphael (1983), Dürer to Veronese: Sixteenth-century Painting in the National Gallery (1999) and Art of the Italian Renaissance Bronze: The Robert H. Smith Collection (2005). He contributed to the exhibition catalogue Raphael: From Urbino to Rome (2004). With Eike D. Schmidt, he co-wrote the forthcoming Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe (2008).
The National Gallery, Its Collection and Exhibitions
When the British House of Commons purchased 38 paintings for £57,000 from the estate of late Russian émigré banker John Julius Angerstein in April 1824, the nucleus of the National Gallery's collection was formed. These works and other acquisitions remained in Angerstein's overcrowded former Pall Mall townhouse. They were later moved into a slightly larger location nearby until the museum's Trafalgar Square building was completed in 1838. Among the current edifice's most recent expansions are its Northern Extension (1975) and the Sainsbury Wing (1991). Admission to the museum is free; a fee is charged for certain special exhibitions.
The National Gallery's collection is composed of more than 2300 Western European paintings dating from 1250 to 1900, covering the Early Renaissance to Post-Impressionism. Its highlights include The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) by Jan van Eyck, The Virgin of the Rocks (ca. 1491-1508) by Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Pinks by Raphael, The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger, Supper at Emmaus (1601) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (ca. 1637-38) by Anthony van Dyck, A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (ca. 1670-72) by Johannes Vermeer, Bathers at Asnières (1884) by Georges Seurat and Les Grandes Baigneuses (1894-1905) by Paul Cézanne.
The museum maintains active programs in research and public education as well as a full roster of special exhibitions. Most notable among the National Gallery's recent expositions are Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (1999-2000), Seeing Salvation: The Image of Christ (2000), Vermeer and the Delft School (2001), Art in the Making: Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings (2002-03), Titian (2003), El Greco (2004), Rubens: A Master in the Making (2005-06), Velázquez (2006-07), Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals (2007) and Renaissance Siena: Art for a City (2007-08).
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