Sir Charles Robert Saumarez Smith (born 28 May 1954) is a British cultural historian specialising in the history of art, design and architecture. He was the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2007 until he stepped down in 2018. He was replaced by Axel Rϋger, who took up the position in 2019. Before, he was director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1994 to 2002 and director of the National Gallery from 2002 to 2007. He has published various articles and books, including The Company of Artists:The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and was a judge at the World Architecture Festival 2014 in Singapore and the Young Masters 2014 awards in London. Saumarez Smith was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List. Biography Charles Saumarez Smith was born in an old rectory in the Wiltshire village of Redlynch, near Salisbury. The son of William Hanbury Saumarez Smith, a former Indian civil servant and the great-grandson of the 19th-century Archbishop of Sydney William Saumarez Smith. His older brother was the London bookseller John Saumarez Smith. He was educated at Marlborough College, where a Gainsborough portrait belonging to the school first awakened his interest in art. He then studied history and history of art at King's College, Cambridge, gaining a double first, and, following graduation, was awarded a Henry Fellowship to study at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied for his doctorate under Michael Baxandall at the Warburg Institute, London, and was awarded a PhD in 1986 for his thesis entitled "Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle and the architecture of Castle Howard". Meanwhile, he was appointed Christie's Research Fellow in the History of Applied Arts at Christ's College, Cambridge and taught part-time in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. In 1982, Saumarez Smith was appointed by Sir Roy Strong as an Assistant Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he helped to establish the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design and was a contributor to The New Museology, published in 1989. In 1990, his PhD thesis was published by Faber and Faber under the title The Building of Castle Howard and was awarded the Alice David Hitchcock medallion. In the same year, he was appointed as Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.