About Roy Strong
Sir Roy Colin Strong, (born 23 August 1935) is an English art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer. He has served as director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Strong was knighted in 1982, and made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2016. == Early years == Roy Colin Strong was born at Winchmore Hill (at that time in Middlesex; it later became part of the London Borough of Enfield), the third son of hat manufacturer's commercial traveller George Edward Clement Strong, and Mabel Ada Strong (née Smart). He was raised in "an Enfield terrace sans books, with linoleum 'in shades of unutterable green'", and attended nearby Edmonton County School, a grammar school in Edmonton. Strong graduated with a first-class honours degree in history from Queen Mary College, University of London. He then earned his PhD degree from the Warburg Institute and became a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. He put aside his passionate interest in the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I in order to write a thesis on Elizabethan Court Pageantry, supervised by Renaissance scholar Dame Frances Yates, "'who [he says] restructured and re-formed my thinking'". In 2007, Strong listed his qualifications as DLitt PhD FSA. == Career == === National Portrait Gallery === He became assistant keeper of the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1959. In 1967, aged 32, he was appointed its director, a post he held until 1973.
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