It is with great sadness that AAANZ informs its members of the death of Angus Trumble, the distinguished art historian, writer, curator and museum director, and good friend and colleague to many of you.
For those of you who did not know Angus Trumble, here is a brief summary of his career:
Angus studied Fine Arts and History at the University of Melbourne graduating in 1986 and went on to undertake an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 1987. He then served as ADC to the Governor of Victoria at that time, Dr Davis McCaughey until 1991, during which time he researched his first book, Victoria’ Colonial Governors 1839-1900 (co-authored with Davis McCaughey and Naomi Perkins), published in 1993. That year saw him based at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome while completing his MA in Art History at Melbourne University and the following year he won a Fulbright Scholarship for further study at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Angus’s museum career commenced with his appointment as Associate Curator (and later Curator) of European Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia from 1996 to 2001, where he produced some important and influential exhibitions, including Bohemian London in 1997 and Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria in 2002. He then took up the position of Curator (later Senior Curator) of Painting and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art from 2003 to 2014, where he again presented some remarkable exhibitions, ranging from the small and scholarly – Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret (co-curated with conservator Mark Aronson) in 2008 – to the dazzling blockbuster, Edwardian Opulence: British art at the dawn of the twentieth century in 2013. In his spare time, he wrote two witty books of social history: A Brief History of the Smile, 2003, and The Finger: A Handbook, 2010, as well as contributing articles to the Burlington Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review and Australian Book Review.
His appointment as Director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra from 2014 to 2018 saw him return to Australia and re-engage with cultural life in this country. During his directorship he secured major acquisitions (such as John Webber’s portrait of William Bligh c.1776, and Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Helena Rubinstein 1957), oversaw the Gallery’ restructuring as a statutory authority, established the Foundation and implemented a diverse exhibition program (including contemporary women portrait artists; Australian movie portraits; and the Gallery’ twentieth anniversary exhibition showcasing twenty new portrait commissions). He was also elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2015. His tenure at the NPG ended with a flourish, as the catalogue of the Gallery’s exhibition, Demsey’s People: A folio of British Street Portraits 1824-1844, (authored by David Hansen) was awarded the 2018 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.
At the time of his death, Angus was a Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia and was in the final stage of publishing his book on Helena Rubinstein in Australia. He had recently been elected a Fellow of Trinity College. He was aged 58.
Angus had a brilliant and original mind which delighted and enlightened all who knew him.
Image: Angus Trumble in 2014, while he was director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Photographer: Alex Ellinghausen
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