Mr Trumble served as National Portrait Gallery director from 2014 to 2018, guiding the institution through some challenging times, including the beginning of the building's structural repairs in 2018.

The National Portrait Gallery issued a statement on Tuesday following the news of Mr Trumble's death.

"The National Portrait Gallery is devastated to hear of the sudden passing of former director Angus Trumble," the statement read.

"Angus was director of the National Portrait Gallery from February 2014 until December 2018. During his tenure the institution reached many significant milestones including; becoming a statutory authority, the establishment of the Foundation and the 20th anniversary celebrations culminating in the ambitious 20/20 exhibition.

"Angus was a creative, dynamic and highly regarded leader. We are deeply saddened by the news of his passing, he will be missed by his many portrait gallery friends.

"Our thoughts are with his family at this time."

Originally from Melbourne, Mr Trumble was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University. He was curator of international art at the Art Gallery of South Australia from 1996 to 2001 and worked at Yale University's Centre for British Art from 2003 until his appointment at the National Portrait Gallery.

"I have always had a great interest in history as distinct from art history, so for me, a national portrait gallery is the ideal place to be because it's where stories about people form essentially a national narrative, historical in the past, present and future as well, as distinct from a single-genre museum," he said at the time.

Mr Trumble studied fine arts and history at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1986. In the summer of 1987, he was an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, before serving as an aide to then-governor of Victoria J. Davis McCaughey until 1991. Mr Trumble studied for a year at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome in 1993, and in 1994 he won a Fulbright Scholarship for further study at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

During his time as National Portrait Gallery director, Mr Trumble was known for his dedication to the arts and his sense of humour and energetic personality. Nothing was more exemplary of that than the National Portrait Gallery's "trippy" 2018 dance video titled "Can't Get Hugh", which was set to Kylie Minogue's hit song Can't Get You Out Of My Head.

Mr Trumble starred in the dance video which featured staff wearing Hugh Jackman masks doing a bit of light dancing.

It was all in the name of the Museum Dance Off - an informal competition where staff from museums and institutions around the world made silly dance videos that the internet-going public could vote on.

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Mr Trumble was the gallery's third director and was followed by the current (and now outgoing) director Karen Quinlan. Mr Trumble decided to leave the role because he believed an institution such as the National Portrait Gallery - a single-genre collection - would always benefit from a shake-up.

One of the largest projects undertaken during his tenure was the lead up to the portrait gallery's building repairs, which saw it close for six months in 2019.

"The interesting thing - and I've found this wherever I've worked - is that generally speaking the building is the most valuable object in your collection, and it's certainly the most complex," he said at the time.

"It's like inhabiting a very sensitive, lumbering endangered mastodon. It breathes, it coughs and splutters from time to time, has aches and pains, especially if it's an old building - that just gets more and more evident as time passes."

Mr Trumble also released a series of books, including the 2004 book, A Brief History of the Smile.

Since his time as director, Mr Trumble also worked as a senior research fellow in Australian history at the National Museum of Australia.

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