MENU monday may 18 2020

How retired hedge fund manager Chris Levett started a museum

Levett has always collected things, from football cards, war medals and old coins to classical artefacts. He reveals how his love of history, art and numbers helped to curate an international resource

James Palmer

Saturday May 16 2020, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

Art for art’s sake: Chris Levett at the Mougins Museum of Classical Art GIANLUCA TAMORRI

Share Save

CHRIS LEVETT RANK: 551= Hedge fund £222m ▼£3m 2019: £225m, 535= I didn’t set out with the idea of starting a museum — it just came about because I’d collected far more art, antiquities and ancient armour than I could ever display at home. It was the only fair thing to do — to get everything out and make it available to the public, for study and for easy loans to other museums. That’s one of the great strengths of the collection. We are digitising everything; it will all be online by the end of the year, allowing curators to see what’s available for loans.

We recently loaned a 1st- or 2nd-century marble head of Odysseus with an 18th-century provenance to the British Museum for its Troy exhibition, which was amazing. Another favourite of mine is a bronze head of Augustus, also 1st-century, that was found in Rome in 1880 — it’s an incredible piece. It has some fire damage, believed to be from the Great Fire of Rome during Nero’s time, which burnt most of the city down. The oldest pieces are Egyptian and date back to about 2,400BC.

When we opened the Museum of Classical Art in Mougins, in the south of France, in 2011, the idea was to juxtapose ancient and modern. I am fascinated by the way so many 20th-century artists were influenced by antiquity, so in a single cabinet you might find a 2,000-year-old torso of Aphrodite beside a bronze statue by Dali of Aphrodite as a girae.

THE SUNDAY TIMES Rich List 2020 Browse our website to discover the full list, extended profiles, graphics, facts and figures The definitive guide to wealth

I have always been a fanatical collector. Some people just have that addictive gene, I suppose; they collect buttons, or seashells, or football cards — or Damien Hirsts. In my case, as a child I collected not only football cards, which were all the rage in the late 1970s, but also First and Second World War campaign medals and Georgian and Victorian coins. There was a coin and medal shop along the street in Southend, Essex, where I grew up. It was fascinating to wander in as a kid and spend my pocket money there. We had a lot of family war medals at home, going back to the Boer War, and that was the spark of it. Most of my ancestors were in the army and my dad was with the Coldstream Guards in Malaya in the late 1940s — the last campaign fought by a family member.

The Second World War was a constant topic in our house. My mum grew up in Finchley during the Blitz and had been evacuated. Her father was in the Metropolitan police, and was posted to Germany after the war, so they spent a couple of years in Germany. Mum visited the aftermath of two concentration camps when she was only 13. It had a huge impact on her then, and still does.

I was born in 1970. I have three brothers and a sister, all much older than me. It was a very working-class background, really. I went to the local comprehensive school, where history quickly became my favourite subject. Our family holidays were spent in the UK, and we would always visit cathedrals, castles, the British Museum, the Ashmolean, or go to Roman villas — that sort of thing.

The museum’s ancient Egypt display ALAMY

At that time my father was a bookmaker. We would go to the dog track some evenings, and the racecourses at the weekend, so I grew up around betting. I think that environment gave me a head for probabilities and permutation scenarios from the age of about four, and I also saw the futility of gambling without a strategy on many occasions, first hand.

Those experiences helped me hugely when I got a job in the City, aged 20, with a small brokerage house, and helped lead to a meteoric rise in earnings during my twenties and thirties. I was amazed at how many traders who had been there for years were novices in these arts. I didn’t go to university: I had a diploma in business studies and had been a photocopier salesman.

In 1995 I joined the Paris oce of a New Jersey-based hedge fund called Commodities Corporation — famous for being one of the world’s first hedge funds when it was set up, in 1969, by a group of Princeton professors. I was single, trading commodities all week, going out every Friday and Saturday for a big night out, then getting up the next day with a huge hangover, like you do when you are 25 or so. I used to walk o the hangovers in the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay and the Picasso museum.

RICH LIST 2020 The 50 richest hedge fund managers

Search in table Page 1 of 5

Rank Source 2020 Wealth of (2019) Name 2020 Rise / fall wealth

Michael Hedge 1 (1) £4,859m ▲£1,159m Platt fund

Robert Miller Duty-free and shopping, Princess 2 (2) £2,150m ▼£50m fashion Marie- and Chantal finance and family

Sir Hedge 3 (3) Michael £1,500m No change fund Hintze

Sir Chris Hedge 4 (4) £1,300m ▲£100m Hohn fund

Alan Hedge 5 (5) £1,200m ▲£160m Howard fund

David Hedge 6 (6) £900m ▼£120m Harding fund It became my weekend pastime to look at art and try to understand it, to read books about it. I was captivated by it all. I didn’t really collect cohesively — I just bought a picture from an art gallery if I really, really liked it. The first picture that I bought in Paris was in 1995 — a painting of a fire scene in Delft, created in the 1600s by a Dutch artist called Egbert van de Poele; I paid 100,000 French francs for it. It sort of went on from there.

I had started collecting coins again in my twenties — Roman and Greek — and started buying Cromwellian armour and some medieval shields, crossbows and swords. Then in the 2000s this very large collection of ancient arms and armour came on the market from a German chap called Axel Guttmann, who had been collecting it until he died in 2001. So, much of the collection in Mougins today had already been collected by Guttmann, but in the past five or six years it has become almost impossible to find things with great provenance.

A 2,000-year-old Roman urn that had been used for a table lamp in the 1970s RICHARD VALENCIA/MACM

Recently I returned seven ancient helmets to Spain after I discovered they had been looted from an archaeological site 30 years ago. I had bought six of the helmets in 2008 and 2009 at auction in Germany. I’d bought the other one through a registered London dealer. The helmets had been looted in the 1980s, and in 2018 the two men responsible were jailed in Spain. The moment I heard about this, before the court case, I oered the helmets to the Spanish authorities.

I’m not really adding to the antiquities side now. In the past six or seven years I’ve had a renewed interest in the postwar period and most of the art that I have bought has been modern or contemporary. So the collection at Mougins has become even more diverse.

My father died of a heart attack 25 years ago, just before I went to Paris and before I had this huge escalation in earnings — so he never got to see the collection.

But I’d like to think my mum’s quite pleased about the way things have turned out.

ON A PEDESTAL

1,000 The number of artefacts at the Museum of Classical Art in Mougins

RICH LIST 2020 The Top 1,000

10  Search by name or source

Rank  Name Worth 2020 (2019)

1 (5) Sir James Dyson and family £16.2bn

2= (1) Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family £16bn

2= (2) David and Simon Reuben £16bn

4 (4) Sir Leonard Blavatnik £15.78bn

5 (3) Sir Jim Ratcliffe £12.15bn

6 (6) Kirsten and Jorn Rausing £12.1bn

7 (8) Alisher Usmanov £11.68bn

8 (13) Guy, George and Galen Jr Weston and family £10.53bn

9 (7) Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho £10.3bn

10 (14) The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family £10.3bn

1 to 10 of 1 000  First  Prev Next  Last 

The wealth code

Each profile is listed with its Rich List rank followed by their source of wealth.

Current valuation for 2020, followed by the rise or fall on 2019 wealth (indicated by arrows ▲▼), or indication of No change or New entry.

Wealth and rank from Rich List 2019 in italics where applicable.

Related articles RELATIVE VALUES Richard Branson and his sister Vanessa on childhood pranks and life on Necker

SIR RICHARD BRANSON AND FAMILY RANK: 40 Transport, finance and fitness clubs £3.625bn ▼£425m 2019: £4.05bn, 34 Vanessa We were very...

May 16 2020, 6.00pm BST Hannah Evans

Why Monzo’s co-founder swapped banking for alpacas

PAUL RIPPON RANK: 982= Financial services £120m New entry It wasn’t supposed to turn out quite like this. When Paul Rippon... May 16 2020, 6.00pm BST The Sunday Times

WORLD EXCLUSIVE Sir James Dyson: Britain’s richest man blew £500m on an electric car

SIR JAMES DYSON AND FAMILY RANK: 1 Household goods and technology £16.2bn ▲£3.6bn 2019: £12.6bn, 5 “This is the first one that ran...

May 16 2020, 6.00pm BST The Sunday Times

 BACK TO TOP

GET IN TOUCH

About us Contact us

Help The Times Editorial Complaints

The Sunday Times Editorial Complaints Place an announcement

Classified advertising Display advertising

The Times corrections The Sunday Times corrections

Careers

MORE FROM THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES The Times e-paper The Sunday Times e-paper

Times Currency Services The Sunday Times Wine Club

Times Print Gallery Times Crossword Club

Sunday Times Driving Times+

The Sunday Times Rich List Times Expert Traveller

Good University Guide Schools Guide

Newsletters Best Places to Live

Best Places to Stay Sportswomen of the Year Awards

Times Appointments Podcasts

Times Money Mentor

© Times Newspapers Limited 2020. Registered in England No. 894646. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF.

Privacy & cookie policy Licensing

Cookie settings Site map

Topics Commissioning terms

Terms and conditions