Charles Saumarez Smith: Fine art dandy

At first sight it looked like the most predictable of career moves - a simple changing of places on the stately carousel of arts management, of no more significance than the curator of pots at the Ashmolean relocating to the curatorship of jars at the Fitzwilliam. But when it was announced this week that Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, would be leaving in the autumn to become secretary and chief executive at the Royal Academy, tongues began to wag. The rumours did not concern his fitness to run this troubled, currently leaderless organisation; they concerned the manner of his departure.

Was he pushed? Was he being punished for being too "populist" (for which read "commercial")? Had he fallen foul of the purse-holders at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport? Or was it some private battle with the all-seeing, all-powerful trustees of the gallery's board?

Rumours have spread for a while about Peter Scott, QC, the board's chairman, a tough, abrasive legal grandee, former chairman of the General Council of the Bar. He has been in the gallery chair in 2000 and welcomed Saumarez Smith when he became director in 2002. He greeted this week's news with regret and spoke about his director's "remarkable achievement" over five years. But for some time, it is said, the two men had not got along. Board meetings, it's alleged, were conducted in an atmosphere of hostility towards the (absent) director. Scott, it was said, did everything to "undermine" Saumarez Smith and countermand his decisions.

Three weekends ago, it all came to a head. The trustees - who include Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, Jon Snow from Channel 4 News, James Fenton the former Oxford professor of poetry, Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins, Lady Normanby (the former Nicola Shulman) and David Ekserdjian the academic - held a two-day meeting, at which, it is alleged, Scott voiced his concern about whether Saumarez Smith was the right person to run the National Gallery. Trustees counter-attacked and called on Scott to resign. A week later, a gallery spokesman felt it necessary to confirm that the incumbent director's contract would last until his retirement at 65.

When the smoke cleared, Scott was (rather unexpectedly) pledging his support for Saumarez Smith but saying it was up to the trustees whether he himself stayed or went. It's increasingly difficult to distinguish the board of trustees at the National Gallery from a nest of hissing serpents.

It seems that Scott and Saumarez Smith disagreed on many issues, such as the appointment of new trustees; and that it's here, rather than in accusations of "dumbing down" or excessive populism, that the row has its roots.

The National's outgoing director is not a veteran of rows. In the whispering gallery of arts commentary and scholarship, he is an unusually agreeable and well-liked figure. When he took over from Neil MacGregor, even his rivals predicted he would be a great success. Alan Borg, a former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and a critic famously sparing with his compliments, called him "a very nice man, and good at his job. I'm a fan". There have, however, been dissenting voices.

An anonymous letter to this newspaper, signed only "NG", bitches about his lack of leadership, the "degredation of pay and conditions" during his tenure and his legacy of "a prolonged strike". More substantial attacks have come from critics who deprecate his "appearance-mad" stewardship, his fondness for appearing in print and on TV shows, his "messy" exhibitions, and the lunacy of his allowing gallery space to Rolf Harris. He is a showman with a finger on the public pulse of art appreciation, who has recently found the fingers of the prosaic, the cautious and the carping around his throat.

Charles Saumarez Smith was born at Redlynch near Salisbury in 1954, in a former vicarage. The church loomed large over his childhood. His father was diocesan secretary, whose work took the family to Surrey and Cambridgeshire.

Saumarez Smith grew up in a village (Cuddesdon) mostly inhabited by aspirant priests, and is sometimes said to know every would-be bishop in the country. The family name - with the exotic, Latino-sounding "Saumarez" breaking up the simple "Charles Smith" - has a remarkable genesis. His great-great-grandfather Richard had been a soldier in the Rifle Brigade. His best friend was called Saumarez (an old Channel Islands name) and the friends became rivals for the hand of a woman. They arranged a swimming race across Guernsey Bay, in which the winner would marry her. (The lady's opinion of this isn't recorded.) Smith won, but promised to call their first-born "Saumarez".

The child, William Saumarez Smith, emigrated to Australia with five children after his wife died, and went on to become Bishop Smith of Sydney in 1890; when his parishioners objected that it was too boring a name for a bishop, he tacked on his middle name, where it stayed as the family surname for ever.

Saumarez Smith's father, William, met Betty Raven, a priest's daughter, when he was on leave from India after the war; she was a Cambridge hockey blue and their courtship took place "mainly in a canoe on the River Cam". Young Charles learned to box at his first boarding school and first opened his eyes to art at Marlborough college, where there was a fine Gainsborough portrait he especially admired. When, in the 1990s, the school decided to sell the portrait to raise much-needed cash, Saumarez Smith led a nostalgic protest; sadly, it didn't work.

He was dazzlingly clever at school, a fan of E H Gombrich, author of The Story of Art, which he devoured at 15. Gombrich's books became the cornerstone of his art-historical library, and the Viennese sage influenced his thinking - especially, it seems, his belief in the absolute value of high culture, and his respect for the European tradition of studying the humanities, at a period when universities were keen to embrace the new gods of post-modernism.

Saumarez Smith went to King's College Cambridge and took a double first in art history. After postgraduate study at Harvard, he became head of research at the Victoria & Albert and entered the hugely competitive charivari of gallery- and museum-directing. Coming to the National Portrait Gallery in 1994, he found a new arena for his flamboyant skills: freed from research, he could concentrate on showmanship and pulling in the crowds.

"When I moved from the V&A to the Portrait Gallery," he told The Guardian in 2003, "I ceased to be a specialist and became involved in all manner of things for which I had no training - and I found that I enjoyed it, which may have been seen as a federal offence."

To some, it was. So was his new-found streak of dandyism, as if the V&A's former director, Sir Roy Strong, had passed on some fop gene. In 2001, when Prince Charles came to open the new Tate galleries, Saumarez Smith showed up in a swishy, dove-coloured, tailor-made corduroy suit and was ticked off by one of the nation's leading arts sponsors. "You're doing your image," he was told, "terrible damage." It didn't quell the doubters when he launched an exhibition of photographic portraits by Mario Testino, super-snapper to the stars. The giant images of Kate Moss, Jerry Hall, Princess Diana and platoons of glitzy celebrities was so popular with the public that tickets had to be booked days in advance, as though for a play or opera. The exhibition brought 30,000 visitors to the gallery, none of them bothered by critical dismissals of it as "fashionable tat".

In his five years at the National Gallery, Saumarez Smith's suits have become darker, he has resisted all impulses to mount exhibitions of Rankin or Herb Ritts prints, but he has demonstrated a shrewd eye for what will "sell" to the public. His exhibitions of Raphael, Caravaggio and Rubens were well received, but were eclipsed by the Velazquez hang last summer. Visitors went to it again and again, urged their friends to go, marvelled at the Spaniard's teenage experiments in capturing the moment when frying eggs solidify in a pan, gazed in rapture at the glowing flesh of the Rokeby Venus's bottom, as if they'd never seen it before. A startling 300,000 of them flooded through the gallery's doors.

His most impressive coup, however, has been in money management. When Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks (lent to the Gallery for 10 years by the Duke of Northumberland) was offered for sale to the Getty museum in California shortly after he took over, Saumarez Smith launched a campaign to raise the necessary £29m in public funds; he finally secured it in February 2004 by striking a deal for £22m. He has argued, fluently and often, for the need for more funds - first, in order to acquire more artworks in the middle market rather than spending their grant on a small number of canonical works; and second, to improve the hanging space and research facilities and recognise their importance to a gallery.He has also argued for a more enlightened "free admissions" policy by the Government.

There's little doubt that the National's charismatic outgoing director will bring some coherence to the Royal Academy and its crew of squabbling academicians, but did he need to move at all? "It's outrageous that Charles has gone," says a friend. "He's imaginative, creative, visionary. He was taking the National Gallery into the 21st century. He wanted to modernise it and he knew it wouldn't be easy. But his relationship with Scott was so bad, it was clear that one of them had to go. It's very sad for the National that it had to be him."

A Life in Brief

BORN 28 May 1954, Redlynch, Wiltshire, to William Hanbury Saumarez Smith, a diocesan secretary, and Alice Elizabeth Harness Raven.

FAMILY Married Romilly Le Quesne Savage, 1979; two sons, Otto, born 1987, and Ferdinand, born 1990.

EDUCATION Marlborough College; King's College Cambridge, BA (Hons) art history; 1976; MA, 1978.

CAREER Head of research, V&A, 1990-94; director, National Portrait Gallery, 1994-2002; director, National Gallery, 2002-2007; secretary, Royal Academy, 2007- .

PUBLICATIONS The Building of Castle Howard, 1990; Eighteenth Century Decoration, 1993; The National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

HE SAYS "There's a perception that you're either part of the traditional world of museums, or involved in the world of contemporary culture. If you try to do both, you're perceived as superficial."

THEY SAY "This is not Neil MacGregor's rigorous National Gallery of old: it is Charles Saumarez Smith's appearance-mad National Gallery of today." - - Waldemar Januszczak, art critic