In for a Penny

LONDON—Nicholas Penny has moved from one national gallery to another. The esteemed senior curator of sculpture in Washington, D.C., takes up the post of director of the London museum this month.

Penny, 58, lost out to Charles Saumarez Smith in the contest for the position six years ago. This was little more than a blip in an otherwise brilliant career, which has included a stint as head of Western painting at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and a decade at London’s National Gallery, where, in 1998, he took over the Renaissance painting department.

The art historian, author and curator is perhaps most widely known for his 1991 attribution of The Madonna of the Pinks, a circa 1506–7 canvas owned by the duke of Northumberland, to Raphael. The duke subsequently lent the work to the National Gallery but, in 2002, decided to sell it, much to the distress of those who felt it should stay in the U.K. Saumarez Smith led a testing two-year campaign to raise the £22 million ($44 million) needed to buy it for the London institution.

Penny will have his own money-raising challenges, since escalating prices for Old Masters are luring more and more museum lenders to the market. He is otherwise tight-lipped about his plans, saying only that he hopes to “extend and deepen the ways in which the gallery serves its public and the great art within its care.” 

"In for a Penny" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.