In college, he sang - tenor - in school ensembles. He didn't have a clear career destination, but grew so excited by art he switched majors, as a sophomore, to art history. "I had very little exposure to the visual arts until that time."

When Rub began visiting Philadelphia, one of the works that hooked him was Rogier van der Weyden's The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning, the spare and strangely powerful diptych (circa 1460) from the Johnson Collection that is one of the museum's gems.

The piece lacked the place of ceremony it has today (dramatically lit and set above a stone altar), not to mention the restoration unveiled in 1993. But it mesmerized Rub.

"In van der Weyden's work you see an extraordinary humanism coupled with an intense spirituality. And for me the most deeply moving of his paintings is the one in this collection. I was entranced by this work, and I still have that same feeling every time that I stand before it. These things are really hard to predict. Every once in a while you connect to something in a way that's inexplicable."

After graduation in 1974, he took a year and a half off. He spent some time in Palo Alto, Calif., where he worked as a carpenter, waited tables, tended bar - and met his wife-to-be, Sally Harris. And then, with the money he had saved, he went to Europe for the first time to look at art and architecture.

From that point on, everything Rub did pointed him to leadership at a museum. He moved to New York in 1976 and got a master's in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He finished doctoral coursework, but left his dissertation undone. The title: Norman Bel Geddes and Theatre Design in America, 1914-1960.

He landed an internship at the Met, then in 1983 became a curator at New York's Cooper-Hewitt. After four years, he went back to school to earn his MBA at Yale University. From there he became associate director, then director, of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Simultaneously, he went through Harvard University's yearlong Program for Art Museum Directors.

The Hood was a decent-size job, with a $2.3 million budget and staff of 31, but Rub's next move was the big leap. At the Cincinnati Art Museum, where he became director and CEO in 2000, he directed 180 employees and a budget of $11.5 million.

It was there that he gained experience overseeing a large construction project. In his six years in Cincinnati, the museum opened a $10 million wing and raised an endowment allowing for the elimination of admission fees.

The constant moving, he says, has not been easy. Rub will come here in the fall with his wife, a former graphic designer. "She has indulged me immensely," he says. His daughter, Katharine, 19, will continue college in Akron, Ohio. Son Peter, 23, an aspiring pop musician who has been living in California, might move to Philadelphia.

He's still sorting out the question of where they'll live. "We've had just the most abbreviated conversations about this at home," he says.

Music retains a place in Rub's life. He is a fan of singers Audra McDonald and Dawn Upshaw, composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

In his recent spare time - "What spare time?" he says - he reread Stendhal's The Red and the Black, and Hilary Spurling's two-volume biography of Matisse, "my favorite modern painter."

Inevitably, Rub will be compared with his predecessor. Curators came to Philadelphia to work with d'Harnoncourt. She befriended artists - not just the Ellsworth Kellys of the world, but local ones, too.

She rose up - if behind the scenes - when Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic threatened to slip out of town, helping to structure a deal and raise the $68 million required to keep it. She did battle with The Inquirer when it covered museum fire-code violations. She was a stealth player in determining the future of the Barnes and, at her death, was still strategizing to establish a Calder museum here.

If Robert Montgomery Scott was the avuncular and aristocratic museum president who hosted bike rides, and d'Harnoncourt the powerhouse who could wrestle opponents to the ground with velvet gloves, what kind of personification of the museum will Rub prove to be?

"It will be different," says Charles Venable, who worked with Rub for two years as deputy director in Cleveland before becoming director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky. "Even with Anne's sense of humor, her flamboyance, and her sense of dress, Timothy is - even though he's from New York - he's kind of New England. He's somewhat reserved, a little formal in the way he likes to handle his board relations and his staff."

"He's not a fast talker or someone who comes in and dazzles you with sleight of hand or a lot of flash," says Horvitz, Cleveland's chairman. "But he instills confidence in people. He's a very nice person, always pleasant, extremely attractive, a handsome and impressive-looking individual. I don't know what a museum director looks like, but he looks like a museum director."

Contact culture writer Peter Dobrin