Charles Saumarez Smith
Dr. Charles Robert Saumarez Smith (born May 28, 1954 in Redlynch, Wiltshire) is an English art historian and museum director. He is director of the National Gallery and former president of the Museums Association. He is the secretary-designate of the Royal Academy of Arts, having announced his resignation from the National Gallery in March 2007.
Saumarez Smith was educated at Marlborough College, King's College, Cambridge University (where he gained a double first), the Warburg Institute, London (gaining a doctorate in 1986 with his thesis entitled "Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle and the architecture of Castle Howard") and was a Fellow at Harvard.
For four years he worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as head of research before becoming director of the National Portrait Gallery in 1994. There he more than doubled visitor figures by staging exhibitions by contemporary artists, including the fashion photographer Mario Testino. He also presided over the building of an extension to the NPG in 2000, the Ondaatje Wing.
He was passed over for major managerial jobs at the V&A, the Tate Gallery and the British Museum before becoming the director of the National Gallery in 2002. An early success of his directorship was the successful public appeal for the purchase of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks in 2004. As of 2006 he is overseeing extensions to the National Gallery by Dixon Jones architects, who also designed the Ondaatje Wing (although this project was begun by his predecessor Neil MacGregor). Saumarez Smith is an occasional panellist on the BBC's Newsnight Review.
He has written books on Castle Howard and 18th century interior design, and contributed biographies on Quentin Bell and Philip McCammon Core to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
External links
- Profile of Saumarez Smith in The Guardian
- Portraits of Charles Saumarez Smith at the National Portrait Gallery, London