Nicholas Penny was appointed director of London's National Gallery, succeeding Charles Saumarez Smith. His appointment was announced by the gallery in an e-mail after being approved by U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Penny will transfer from Washington, D.C., where he has spent five years as senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art. The Trafalgar Square museum has been without a director since August, when Saumarez Smith left for the Royal Academy of Arts following disagreements with board Chairman Peter Scott. The 183- year-old institution houses one of the world's largest collections of Western European painting, a collection begun in 1824, when the British government bought 38 pictures for the nation from a banker. The appointment was no surprise to the arts community. Penny, a U.K. citizen, spent 12 years at the National Gallery before moving to Washington. He was its curator of Renaissance painting from 1990 to 2002, and keeper for the last four years. He studied at the University of Cambridge and at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. Before joining the National Gallery, he served, for five years, as keeper of Western art at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. Penny, 57, also taught. Starting in 1975, he lectured in art history at the University of Manchester for seven years, and was a professor of fine art at Oxford University from 1980 to 1981. He is author of "The Materials of Sculpture" and has written or co-written books on Piranesi, Raphael, the Florentine sculptor Desiderio da Settignano, and Lucian Freud's works on paper. In addition, Penny is the author or co-author of catalogs on collecting sculpture in early modern Europe, 16th-century Italian painting and the drawings of Ruskin. Since August, the National Gallery has been managed by its director of conservation, Martin Wyld.