Angus Trumble (1964-2022) was born and raised in Melbourne. He studied Fine Arts and History at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1986. In summer of 1987, he was an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. He studied for a year at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, graduating MA (University of Melbourne) in 1993. From 1987 to 1991 he served as aide to Dr J. Davis McCaughey, AC, Governor of Victoria. In 1994 Angus won a Fulbright Scholarship for further study at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
In January 1996 Angus was appointed Associate Curator of European Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, and was promoted Curator in 1998. He curated and wrote the catalogue of a number of exhibitions, including Bohemian London: Camden Town and Bloomsbury Paintings in Adelaide and Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria, which toured to Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland, New Zealand, in 2002.
Angus was appointed Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art in May 2003, and served in that capacity until January 2014 (and from 2008 as Senior Curator). He is the author of A Brief History of the Smile (2003), and The Finger: A Handbook (2010). His book (co-edited with Professor Andrea Wolk Rager of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio), Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, was shortlisted for the 2013 Spears Book Awards in London. He was a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The Burlington Magazine, the Paris Review, Esopus Magazine, and the Australian Book Review.
Angus was Director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia from February 2014 until December 2018. He was a Senior Research Fellow in Australian History at the National Museum of Australia from 2019 until 2022.
