Penny's academic career began with a research fellowship at
Clare Hall, Cambridge, after which he went on to teach
art history at
Manchester University. While still in his early thirties, Penny was appointed to the
Slade Professorship at
Oxford University and to a senior research fellowship at
King's College, Cambridge. 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 Penny was keeper of the department of
Western art at the
Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford and professorial fellow of
Balliol College, Oxford. In 1990 he began a long association with the
National Gallery, 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 undertook 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. Again in 2002, Penny was appointed senior curator of sculpture at the
National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. Following Saumarez Smith's early resignation from his post, Penny was once again a candidate for heading the London National Gallery, and this time he succeeded. During his time as Director, Penny worked with the
National Galleries of Scotland to help secure for the nation two of Titian's paintings:
Diana and Actaeon and
Diana and Callisto. He also oversaw the Gallery's first major acquisition of an American painting,
Men of the Docks by
George Bellows. == Personal life ==