But Gerard Vaughan hopes his three-year stint as director of the National Gallery of Australia will be defined as much by growing daily crowds and a sense of renewal, as by the institution’s troubling times.

Speaking to Fairfax Media on Thursday, his second-to-last day at the helm, Dr Vaughan said he liked to think of his directorship as “just the whole creative, exuberant thing that any director does, whatever their age, coming in with an amazing collection and amazing staff, saying, ‘What are we going to do to bring this place back to life?’” he said.

Despite a focus in recent times on funding, staff cuts and building maintenance, he said the emphasis, for him, had always been the art, be it a glittering display of Cartier jewellery, or an early Frederick McCubbin.

“The things that count in this place are the exhibitions, the rehangs that we've done, the way we're getting out more and more works of art from the collections that have not been seen in decades,” he said.

“We're actually dealing with the issue of having the largest fine art collection in the country by far. Our collection, if you take all of the Melbourne collection, all of the Art Gallery of NSW collection, add them together, they don't even add up to what we have here. What it means is that we have the smallest building of the major art museums, and we've got plans for the future, like everybody else. That's an important thing.”

When he took on the job in 2014, at the end of Ron Radford’s nearly-10-year-run, he had already settled comfortably into a life of academia at Melbourne University, having finished a successful 13-year stint as head of the National Gallery of Victoria.

And while his time in Canberra was always destined to be brief, he already had his work cut out for him.

Questions around the provenance of several of the works in the gallery’s extensive Asian collection meant an extensive rethink of how such works were acquired, as well as a thorough reassessment of each work and its provenance.

The results of the ongoing assessment were made available to the public, and a new era of transparency was born.

But in December 2015, the gallery received what he described as a “king hit” in its government funding.

“If you add it all up, we were down five per cent in operating [funds], with no warning, out of nowhere,” he said.

“And that really caused a shock, not just to us, all across the arts sector in Canberra. We had to lose over 20 staff... We had to pay out all the liabilities, because government put us in a position where we had no choice but to lose staff, but they made no appropriation to ours to cover redundancies. That was another $2.2 million suddenly gone out of our budget.”

He said it took two years for the gallery to recover, and it now has a cash surplus, the first in several years.

“We're feeling very confident, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to lobby government for more money. I think all the arts agencies are doing it and we should too,” he said.

He said the recent report tabled by the Australian National Audit Office, detailing financial woes and mismanagement at the gallery, was misconstrued, due partly to timing.

“Those headlines that suggested that we're on the edge of insolvency - nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.

“And it was a misreading of our risk register, which said we've got a way forward, we've got a financial sustainability plan, we have protocols...

“We're now well on the way to a complete reorganisation of our finances, but in the context of constantly reducing money from government.”

But while he insisted that the gallery was “very grateful to government for the grants that we get”, he said the yearly operating grant of $30.8 million had remained unchanged since 2006.

This is despite the fact that the gallery increased its physical footprint by 25 per cent when it opened its new wing and foyer in 2010.

“Government didn't give us one extra dollar to run the building, and every year more and more was taken away from the operating grant. So you can see why we had a bit of a crisis. It wasn't of our making. It just is the way it panned out,” he said.

But the $21.5 million allocated in the last federal budget would, he said, allow the gallery to continue its building renewal process.

“I really do feel very positive that we've come out of a difficult few years, and we're really doing well at the moment,” he said.

“The building is looking very fresh, a lot of people say that to us. The building's lost that sort of clunky feel. It's clean and crisp and open again, the way it used to be in the 1980s, which is very deliberate on our part.”

And this is on top of massive crowds for the current Cartier exhibition, and several successful shows in recent years.

When asked what his favourite acquisition had been, Dr Vaughan didn’t choose a European masterpiece, or even the monumental Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman, which, overnight, had been gifted to the gallery in honour of Dr Vaughan’s directorship.

He chose, instead, a modest, centuries-old carving from Papua New Guinea - acquired, he was quick to point out, with the blessing of the Papua New Guinean government.

And, as he prepared to return to Melbourne and the world of academia, and get back to all the things he had planned to do before he came to Canberra, he declined to issue any advice to his successor, Nick Mitzevich, who starts on Monday.

“I think he's going to be a big success as the director of the NGA, but I'm not going to predict anything,” he said.