My life through a lens

Celebrities share the stories behind their favourite snaps. This week it’s Fake Or Fortune? co-host Philip Mould, 61

1981

While studying history of art at the University of East Anglia, 32 of us were lucky enough to be sent to Venice for a term – that’s me there on the far right. What an opportunity to immerse ourselves in Renaissance Italy with all that beauty, wine and pasta after utilitarian life on an East Anglian campus. I loved university though, and I started dealing in antiques and art while I was there. I’d go round the local auction rooms on my moped – although I could only buy pictures that would fit on the back. 2015on

Rachel de Thame and I appeared

this episode of Gardeners’ World together where we talked about the 17th-century roses in my Oxfordshire garden. I have also created meadows and ponds where I want wildlife to appear naturally. My father inspired my love of flora and fauna – he hired a botanist for the day for my eighth birthday to take me into Snowdonia. I have always believed that nature and art are intertwined. 1995on

This is me and my wife Catherine

our wedding day at St Mary’s in Usk, South Wales. The vicar warned us everyone wanted to marry in the historic 900-year-old church, but luckily my fatherin-law knew the local bishop. As I was brought up a Catholic I like a bit of Gothic excess, and my boarding school, Worth in West Sussex, was run by Benedictine monks. But as an antiques lover from the North West I was a target for bullies there. 2017

Cracking art-world mysteries has always driven me, and this was a particularly exciting moment on Fake Or Fortune?. My co-host Fiona Bruce and I are looking at a painting that I’d let go for £35,000 when I was a fledgling dealer – I was convinced it was a John Constable but I couldn’t prove it. Anyway, 17 years later we managed to prove it was an authentic work by the great landscapist – and valued at £2 million. It was no longer mine, of course, but I had a very happy client. 1967

Here I am, aged seven, at Kingsmead prep school in the Wirral. It was a Church of England school that nurtured the individual, and I loved it. Academically I was a low achiever, partly because I was dyslexic, but the school was a great help and taught me to conquer public speaking. That led to my interest in presenting. I was an outgoing child but, as my 97-year-old father recently reminded me, highly strung.

1975 I was very nervous for my first TV appearance when I was 15, wearing a cravat and talking about my collection of Georgian shoe buckles on ITV’S Magpie. My late mother, who’d had polio, would drive us around and send me into antiques shops to look for bargains. One day I came out with an 18th-century shoe buckle. I collected around 300 of them. 2012

I’ve appeared on Antiques Roadshow many times, but it was my older brother Anthony who smoothed my path into the art world. He’d been in the business for five years and taught me much about it. Writing and talking about art is a big part of my style of art dealing – I get a lot of pleasure from how words, stories and context can heighten our perception of art. My success has partly come about through a combination of zest for my subject and tunnel vision.

2018

This beguiling hound, my whippet Cedric, is named after one of my favourite artists, Cedric Morris. He’s very much part of my life and even comes to work. In fact, I own a Lucian Freud etching of a whippet which I bought because of Cedric. I love it when art captures feelings and thoughts that words are unable to, and Freud’s etching pinpoints his sprawledout, leggy allure. I’m in awe of Cedric’s bolting speed too – he’s as fast a hawk and enjoys London parks as much as the country. I now have a whippet shape in my heart which Cedric fills.