Nicholas Penny
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Nicholas Penny (born 1949) is a British art historian.
Penny studied at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which he graduated in 1975. He taught art history from 1975 to 1982 at Manchester University, then at King's College, Cambridge. From 1980 to 1981 he served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. 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 he was keeper of the department of Western art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In 1990 he began a long association with the National Gallery, London, 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 fought 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. [1] Again in 2002, Penny was appointed Senior Curator of Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a post which he still holds as of 2006.
Penny is a regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine and the London Review of Books.
