Nicholas Penny

Last updated

Nicholas Penny
Born (1949-12-21) 21 December 1949 (age 72)
United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Education Shrewsbury School
Alma mater St Catharine's College, Cambridge
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Occupation Art historian
Employer(s) Clare Hall, Cambridge
Manchester University
Oxford University
King's College, Cambridge
Ashmolean Museum
Balliol College, Oxford
National Gallery
National Gallery of Art
SpouseMary Crettier
Children2

Sir Nicholas Beaver Penny FBA FSA (born 21 December 1949) is a British art historian. From 2008 to 2015 he was director of the National Gallery in London.

Contents

Early life

Penny was educated at Shrewsbury School before he studied English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. [1] [2] He then studied for a doctorate at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he was taught by Michael Kitson. [3] While a student at the Courtauld, Penny contributed photographs to the Art & Architecture section of the Conway Library collection. [4]

Career

Penny's academic career began with a research fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, after which he went on to teach art history at Manchester University. While still in his early thirties, Penny was appointed to the Slade Professorship at Oxford University and to a senior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. He was the co-author, with Francis Haskell, of Taste and the Antique, a study of the formation of the canon of classical sculpture published in 1984.

Between 1984 and 1989 Penny was keeper of the department of Western art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and professorial fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. In 1990 he began a long association with the National Gallery, joining the institution as Clore Curator of Renaissance Painting. Shortly afterwards, in 1991, he identified the Madonna of the Pinks belonging to the Duke of Northumberland as a genuine Raphael, and not a copy of a lost original as was previously supposed. The painting came to public prominence in 2002 when the Gallery undertook a major fundraising campaign in order to prevent the painting's sale to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Earlier that year Penny made an unsuccessful bid for the directorship of the National Gallery, the post going to Charles Saumarez Smith. Again in 2002, Penny was appointed senior curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Following Saumarez Smith's early resignation from his post, Penny was once again a candidate for heading the London National Gallery, and this time he succeeded.

During his time as Director, Penny worked with the National Galleries of Scotland to help secure for the nation two of Titian's paintings: Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto . [5] He also oversaw the Gallery's first major acquisition of an American painting, Men of the Docks by George Bellows. [5] The Gallery broke its record attendance under Penny's leadership, exceeding six million visitors in 2013. [5] In June 2014, Penny announced his retirement from the National Gallery after six years as Director. [5] He retired in 2015, and was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the Queen's 2015 Birthday Honours.

Penny is a regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine and the London Review of Books . He has also published books, exhibition catalogues, and articles on picture frames and Italian Renaissance painting, and on Raphael, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Richard Payne Knight. [6]

Personal life

Penny has twin daughters.

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Courtauld Institute of Art</span> College of University of London

The Courtauld Institute of Art, commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist colleges for the study of the history of art in the world and is known for the disproportionate number of directors of major museums drawn from its small body of alumni.

Sir Charles Robert Saumarez Smith is a British cultural historian specialising in the history of art, design and architecture. He was the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2007 until he stepped down in 2018. He was replaced by Axel Rϋger, who took up the position in 2019.

Francis James Herbert Haskell, was an English art historian, whose writings placed emphasis on the social history of art. He wrote one of the first and most influential patronage studies, Patrons and Painters.

<i>Borghese Gladiator</i> Hellenistic marble sculpture of a swordsman

The Borghese Gladiator is a Hellenistic life-size marble sculpture portraying a swordsman, created at Ephesus about 100 BC, now on display at the Louvre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Storr (art academic)</span>

Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer.

Martin Postle is a British art historian who is deputy director for collections and publications at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and a leading expert on the art of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He is a former curator at the Tate Gallery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Brown (museum director)</span> British art historian and academic

Christopher Paul Hadley Brown, CBE is a British art historian and academic. He was director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England from 1998 to 2014. He is recognised as an authority on Sir Anthony van Dyck.

Tarnya Cooper is an art historian and author who is currently the National Trust's Curatorial & Collections Director.

Sir Christopher John White CVO FBA is a British art historian and curator. He is the son of the artist and art administrator Gabriel White. He has specialized in the study of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age painting and printmaking.

Alexander John Sturgis is a British art historian and museum curator. He is the current Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He was Director of the Holburne Museum in Bath from 2005 to September 2014.

Colin Barry Bailey is a British art historian and museum director. Bailey is currently the Director of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. He is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art, specifically on the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Nicholas Cullinan is an art historian and curator. On 6 January 2015 it was announced that he would be the 12th director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a post he took up in the spring.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penelope Curtis</span>

Penelope Curtis is a British art historian and curator. Fom 2015 to 2020 she was the director of Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, and from 2010 to 2015 director of Tate Britain. She is the author of several monographs on sculpture and has written widely at the invitation of contemporary artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Rosenthal</span>

Michael J. Rosenthal is emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Warwick. He is a specialist both in British art and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the arts of early colonial Australia.

London Art Week is a cooperative of approved art galleries and auction houses, situated in the Mayfair and St James's district of central London, which deal in pre-contemporary art, Old Masters and antiquities.

Dillian Rosalind Gordon OBE is a British art historian who worked as a curator at the National Gallery, London from 1978 to 2010, latterly as Curator of Italian Paintings before 1460. She lives in Oxford. She was appointed OBE in 2011 for services to Early Italian Painting. She has authored and co-authored many books, including several National Gallery catalogues.

Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (1907–1978) was a Scottish-born American art historian specialising in British 18th-century sculpture, a professor, museum director and post-World War II 'Monuments Man'. He was the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and director of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Susanna Mary Avery-Quash is a British art historian, curator, and author.

Bruce Ambler Boucher FSA is an art historian and curator. He is Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane's Museum, London and Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London (UCL).

References

  1. "Sir Nicholas Penny | Directors | National Gallery, London". www.nationalgallery.org.uk. Retrieved 6 March 2018.
  2. "Breakfast with the FT: Nicholas Penny". www.ft.com. 3 January 2014. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  3. "Questionnaire: Nicholas Penny | Frieze". Frieze. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  4. "Who made the Conway Library?". Digital Media. 30 June 2020. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Nicholas Penny Steps Down from London's National Gallery". artnet News. 23 June 2014. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  6. "Nicholas Penny". www.nga.gov. Retrieved 8 November 2020.

Sources

Academic offices
Preceded by Slade Professor of Fine Art,
Oxford University

1980–81
Succeeded by