A former British Museum staffer who worked in the prints and drawings department in the 1970s stole more than 350 artworks and sold some of his haul at an antiques market, according to a new book.
As reported by the Independent, “The story of the thefts is recounted in Barnaby Phillips’s forthcoming book, The African Kingdom of Gold—about stolen treasure—and states that Peverett’s thefts were recorded by the museum after they came to light, and an effort was made to recover the stolen artworks.”
The crimes were perpetrated by Nigel Peverett, who was caught after his time on staff in 1992, when he was stopped while leaving the British Museum with 35 prints worth £5,000 (around $6,700). Police found 169 more pilfered prints at Peverett’s cottage in Kent worth than $36,000, and he admitted to having already sold another 150 prints in addition.
“Peverett had taken the antique artworks—sometimes going into the British Museum with one bag and ‘coming out with four’—and using a razor, had scraped off the museum catalogue numbers, or cut them down in size, before selling them through a dealer who sold them at his stall at Portobello Road antiques market,” according to the Independent, which reported that the British Museum recovered 55 stolen prints while at least 95 remain outstanding.
In a statement to the Independent, a spokesperson for the British Museum said, “These events occurred decades ago, and the individual was caught and prosecuted at the time. Thefts will unfortunately always be a risk for every museum, and for this reason, we take safeguarding the collection incredibly seriously. Alongside security measures, making the collection more widely known is another way we feel makes it safer and in 2023, we committed to have it fully digitised within five years.”
As ARTnews reported in 2023, that plan to digitize pertained to 2.4 million records and had been implemented after the discovery of 2,000 items having been stolen by Peter Higgs, a former Greek antiquities curator who lifted what the British Museum described as “gold jewellery and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century.”
