The Christian Levett biography

Christian Levett, a former British investment manager with a true passion for art and history, is a fanatical, but highly ethical, art collector and founder and owner of the Mougins Museum.
In his childhood, he started collecting 18th and 19th-century English coins and World War I campaign medals at the age of seven. In his mid-twenties after success in the finance sector, he rediscovered his love of collecting.
At 25, he moved to Paris where he spent much of his time visiting the major museums of this culturally-rich capital and started to collect paintings. This sparked his interest further in art history and was the ideal place to explore and educate himself even more in this domain. His interest in collecting Roman coins, hand-painted books and antiquities developed fervently and this led to an important desire to share his collection and passion with the general public.

In June 2011 he opened the Mougins Museum of Classical Art (Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins MACM). Many of his antiquity and classically inspired art collections are housed in this four-story museum located in the heart of the medieval hilltop village of Mougins, in the South of France. The museum’s original concept juxtaposes ancient art with modern and contemporary art, in the aim of highlighting the influences artists have drawn from Antiquity throughout the years to the present day. The MACM won the Apollo Magazine new museum of the year award in 2011 and was the only French museum nominated for the European Museum of the Year awards in 2013

Over the past decades, Levett moved towards the wider art market and began building an important collection of 20th and 21st century art. This includes, amongst others, post-war American art, Zero movement art and African contemporary art. In the last few years, he has built a significant collection of abstract works by female artists. This is now displayed in his home in Florence, an Italian palazzo transformed into an inspiring gallery in its own right, having hosted private tours for museum patrons and university groups, including Harvard, Stanford, and New York University, the Palazzo Strozzi, the Bargello Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Tate.

Christian himself is a keen philanthropist in the fields of the art and history, sponsoring over 30 exhibitions venues like at The British Museum, Royal Academy, National Gallery, Sir John Soane’s Museum, The MET, The Tate, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He has funded archaeological endeavours in the UK, Italy, Egypt and Spain.

He has sponsored academic scholarships at Wolfson College and The Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and has aided curatorial funding at The Ashmolean Museum, The British Museum and The British School at Rome, and the Bargello National Museum at Florence.

He has contributed to renovation works at The Charterhouse Museum London, Charterhouse School Surrey, The National Gallery, the Notre Dame de Vie chapel and its museum in Mougins and more recently Dante’s Cenotaph at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. He has sponsored conferences at King’s College London, Senate House UCL and at The Mougins Museum.

Christian is a member of the visitor’s committee of the Arms and Armour Committee at The Metropolitan Museum of New York, as well as being a member of their International Collectors Council. He is now in his second term as member of The Board of Visitors at The Ashmolean Museum Oxford and is a past board member of The Hadrian’s Wall Trust.

In 2021, he was invited to join the Circle Committee at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
Christian is also an Honorary Fellow of The Ashmolean Museum and Wolfson College Oxford and a member of the Oxford University Chancellors Court of Benefactors.