A former British Museum worker who worked in the prints and paintings department in the 1970s stole more than 350 works of art and sold some of the loot on antiques markets, a new book claims.
It is reported independent“Barnaby Phillips’ upcoming book tells the story of the theft, africa golden kingdom— about the stolen treasures — and noted that the revelations of Pevelet’s thefts were documented by the museum and efforts were made to recover the stolen art. ”
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The perpetrator of these crimes was Nigel Peverett, who was arrested after leaving office in 1992 when he was stopped leaving the British Museum with 35 prints worth £5,000 (approximately $6,700). Police found a further 169 stolen prints worth more than $36,000 at Perfleet’s Kent cottage and he admitted to selling a further 150 prints.
“Peverett took the antique works of art – sometimes going into the British Museum with a bag and ‘coming out with four’ – and used a razor to scrape off the museum catalog numbers, or reduce their size, before selling them through dealers who sold them from stalls at the Portobello Road Antiques Market,” according to the report independentAccording to reports, the British Museum has recovered 55 stolen paintings, while at least 95 are still pending.
in a statement independentA spokesman for the British Museum said: “These incidents occurred decades ago and those involved were caught and prosecuted. Unfortunately, theft is always a risk for every museum, so we take the protection of collections very seriously. In addition to security measures, making the collection more widely known is another way we believe it can make it safer. By 2023, we have committed to fully digitizing it within five years.”
as art news It was reported in 2023 that the digitization plan involved 2.4 million records and was implemented after it was discovered that 2,000 items had been stolen by Peter Higgs. Peter Higgs, a former curator of Greek antiquities, stole what the British Museum said was “gold jewellery, semi-precious stones and glass gemstones dating from the 15th to 19th centuries BC”.
