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Nicholas Penny: Just What the National Gallery Needs

by Zoe Strimpel
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 1:24 PM
updated Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 1:31 PM

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The former curator of sculpture at Washington's National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, will return to London as the director of the National Gallery, it was announced earlier this week. Mr. Penny arrives for one of London's most daunting jobs, once filled by the enormously successful director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor.

The appointment has gone down well among London's artserati. Penny is highly experienced and is seen as an insider; he worked in Trafalgar Square from 1990 to 2002 as the Clore curator of Renaissance painting, but his application for the directorship in 2002 failed. More important, he has stiff scholarly credentials. His work includes "Taste and the Antique," co-written with Francis Haskell (1981), and far more recently, his meticulous National Gallery catalogue, "The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings, Volume 1: Brescia, Bergamo and Cremona" (2004), considered a highly sophisticated, sensitive work. Such knowledge of and commitment to the past, a period that gave rise to a less than sexy area of the museum's mammoth collection, may be just what's needed the gallery needs. This is a frenetic time for London museums — people line up from 5 a.m. for a chance to see the Terracotta Soldiers at the British Museum — and it's easy to see how the Old Masters can slip by the wayside.

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