Peter Nahum

Peter John Nahum (born 19 January 1947) is an English art dealer, author, lecturer, and journalist best known for his frequent appearances on the BBC television program Antiques Roadshow, in which he was present from 1981 to 2002. He discovered a Richard Dadd watercolor on the show which was subsequently sold to the British Museum.

Biography
Nahum was educated at Sherborne School and began his career at Peter Wilson's Sotheby's in 1966. In his 17 years with the company, he initiated the Victorian Painting Department at the recently opened Sotheby's Belgravia in 1971 and was head of the British Painting Department (1840 to Contemporary) until his departure in 1984. Having been a Senior Director in the chairman's committee and advisor to the British Rail Pension Fund on Victorian Paintings.[1]

He left Sotheby's in 1984 to open his gallery, The Leicester Galleries, in St James's, London, specializing in premium quality art from the 19th and 20th centuries, as a worldwide adviser for private collections along with museums, and a signatory for Victorian paintings sold to Japan, as well as an official valuer for the DEWHA. He also acts as a known auctioneer for many charities. He is a television personality, academic, lecturer, author, frame designer, and frequent lender of paintings to international exhibitions.

Nahum pioneered the trading website onlinegalleries.com for art and antique dealers globally, C.I.N.O.A., and their national trade associations.

Public appearances
Peter Nahum was a common contributor to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow from 1981 to 2002, retrieving Richard Dadd's lost watercolor Artists Halt in the Desert in 1987, which got sold to the British Museum, and an album of Filipino landscapes sold in 1995 for £240,000. Other BBC Television appearances include Omnibus (1983), with Richard Baker on Richard Dadd's Oberon and Titania, and In at the Deep End (1984), a 45-minute long program in which he taught television journalist Chris Searle to Auctioneer. He appeared on Breakfast Television, The City Program, The Signals, The Sixty Minutes, and several radio talk shows. . Throughout his career, he has turned counterfeiters to authorities, reporting the Greenhalgh family to the police with full evidence in 1986, although it took another 16 years to convict them., and witnessed the legal definition of fakes and faking. As of this, having appeared in The Artful Codgers made for BBC Four in November 2007. In 1984, Nahum first reported the Greenhalgh family to the police with full evidence, although it took another 16 years to convict them.

In 1986, Nahum lectured on "Victorian Painters as Super Stars – Their Public and Private Art", at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, USA, and in 1993 on "The Poetry of Crisis: British Art 1933–1951" at the Victoria & Albert Museum. More recently [ when?] he spoke on "The Strange Forces around the Finding of Richard Dadd’s Artist’s Halt in the Desert", for the National Arts Collection Fund. He lectures to student bodies and various other organizations.

Contributions

 * Nomi Rowe, In Celebration of Cecil Collins, Visionary Artist and Educator, London 2008, pages 49 – 51
 * Past and Present: Edward Burne-Jones, His Medieval Sources and Their Relevance to his Personal Journey, by William Waters and Peter Nahum, in Edward Burne-Jones: The Earthly Paradise, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Kunstmuseum Bern, pages 179–203, Hartje Cantz, Ostfildern 2009

DVD documentary

 * Paul Raymond Gregory's RingQuest, Narrated by Julian Sands; Narration written by Peter Nahum; Executive producer: Peter Nahum; Produced, directed and edited by Mathias Walin; Photography and sound by Martin Sundström.