It's the easiest job on earth - at least that's what a museum curator once said to me of running Britain's National Gallery. After all, where can Nicholas Penny, who has just been chosen as this splendid museum's new director, go wrong? Your task is to preside over a collection of European oil paintings that is arguably the most encyclopedic on earth, with a Trafalgar Square location that guarantees good visitor numbers. Congratulations, Dr Penny!
Of course it's not really that easy. The Director of the National Gallery has to give intellectual immediacy to art that - tragically - too many people label with the deadly term "Old Masters". Neil MacGregor set a very high standard without ever descending to easy populism. After he left, though, the museum panicked. It tried to make an "impact" with an uneasy mix of high-profile blockbuster exhibitions and sloppy surveys. What has slipped is the sense of high purpose that is its natural strength.
Penny is brilliantly qualified to reestablish and deepen the authority of the National Gallery. He is a true scholar. His 1981 book Taste and the Antique, co-written with Francis Haskell, is a classic. As I write this I'm leafing through his Catalogue of Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona in the National Gallery, published in 2004 - a volume of immense learning and sensitivity on what to many people may seem an obscure part of this museum's collection.
Looking at this recent work by Penny about the National Gallery itself, I feel profound gratitude that a great museum now has a custodian so immersed in its treasures and sensitive to its history. I've a feeling Penny will make a truly great occupant of a post whose previous tenants have included Kenneth Clark, as well as MacGregor. He will stand out as totally different from Britain's other high-profile museum chiefs: far more of a scholar than any of them.
Expect less swank and more substance on Trafalgar Square, and a National Gallery that intellectually dwarfs the louder parts of the London art world.
