I feel like Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz'; picked up by a whirlwind and dropped down in a land where everything is much more brightly coloured," says Thomas Campbell, who on January 1st became the new director and CEO of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. His description is both apt and unexpected.

Until five months ago, the British-born 46-year-old, educated at Oxford University and London's Courtauld Institute of Art, was by his own account, "an open shirt, tweed jacket sort of guy". He liked to clear his diary to give time to his research and writing. Now he owns several new suits and has a crammed schedule. The studies to which he has devoted the past 20 years have had to become a hobby, like the watercolours he paints. The Campbells have moved from the suburbs to a flat near the Fifth Avenue museum. It comes with what many consider the international museum world's top job.

Cinderella also comes to mind when considering the events of the past year. During the search for a successor to Philippe de Montebello, the French-born director who was retiring after 31 years as head of the museum, Mr Campbell, a British tapestry specialist, never featured on the gossips' shortlist, although all but two of the museum's directors in the last century have been recruited from within. Mr Campbell joined the Met in 1995, but he has never headed a department and was only one of its ten curators in European sculpture and decorative arts.

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