Peter Nahum
Peter Nahum is an English art dealer, author, lecturer and journalist who is known for his many appearances on the long running BBC television programme "Antiques Roadshow", on which he appeared from 1981 to 2002. He discovered a long lost Richard Dadd watercolour 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. During his 17 years with the company he initiated the Victorian Painting Department at the newly opened Sotheby's Belgravia in 1971 and was head  of the British Painting Department (1840 to Contemporary) until his departure in 1984. He was also a Senior Director sitting on the chairman's committee and advisor to the British Rail Pension Fund on Victorian Paintings. He left Sotheby's in 1984 to open his own gallery, The Leicester Galleries, in St James's, London, specialising in paintings, drawings and sculptures of the highest quality from the 19th and 20th centuries. He now works independently, actively buying and selling and is currently adviser to major private collections and museums throughout the world, signatory on authentication certificates for Victorian paintings sold  to Japan and official valuer for the Department of Arts, Heritage and Environment of the Government of Australia. He also acts as a celebrity auctioneer for many charities. He is a television personality, academic, lecturer, author, frame designer and frequent lender of paintings to international exhibitions. Nahum created the trading website onlinegalleries.com for the art and antique dealers around the world, all members of C.I.N.O.A. and their own national trade associations. This gives the dealers a trading platform and a chance to display their wares in their own purpose-built websites and galleries, and gives the public the opportunity to  buy with confidence. Public appearances. From 1981 to 2002, Peter Nahum was a regular contributor to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow, rediscovering Richard Dadd's lost watercolour "Artists Halt in the Desert" in 1987, which was later 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 three-quarter of an hour program during which he taught television journalist Chris Searle to auctioneer. He has also appeared on  Breakfast Television, "The City Program" and "Signals" and on "Sixty Minutes", as well as various radio talk shows.. Throughout his career he has reported art fakers to the police, and has had success both in seeing them convicted and seeing the law crystallized in respect to the definition of fakes and faking. In this respect he has appeared in "The Artful Codgers" made for BBC Four in November 2007. In 1984, Nahum who 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 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 organisations. Bibliography. Peter Nahum writes for daily press, for antiques magazines and museum & gallery catalogues. His published works include: