January 2009

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

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Sir Peter was born 76 years ago into one of the best-known business dynasties in the north-west of England. His father, Sir John Moores, made the family’s fortune by the creation of Littlewoods football pools, to which he added an immensely successful mail-order and department-store business. ‘My father made lots of money and didn’t know what to do with it – he didn’t collect. He was a Sunday painter who made copies of famous paintings’, Sir Peter recalls. ‘I was sent south to a boarding school’ – he seems reluctant to name Eton – ‘and I explored the antique shops, building up a knowledge of British furniture. I didn’t buy anything – I only had pocket money – but I made friends with the dealers, particularly Mrs Cox. She didn’t say what something was, simply that it was good.’

‘As soon as I could drive, which was 1949, I suppose, I was off, and didn’t bother with England – I made straight for France and Germany. I worked for a time in a mail-order business in Hanover, and discovered the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and its collection of early German paintings – it knocked me sideways.’ Eton was followed by Christ Church, Oxford, where Sir Peter studied French and German. At that point in his life, thanks to visits to Glyndebourne, music and especially opera, perhaps the greatest passion of his life, intervened. That led to his working at the Vienna Opera as a production assistant for three years, but art was not forgotten: ‘I had a fantastic motoring map – Shell I think – with stars for all the attractions. Using Vienna as my base I set out to explore all the three stars.’ The results of this early enthusiasm are evident in the collection of German art at Compton Verney, ranging from a dramatic Cranach, Lot and his Daughters (Fig. 3), to a serene limewood sculpture of a female saint by Tilman Riemenschneider.