Peter McLeavey

Peter Joseph John McLeavey ONZM (21 September 1936 – 12 November 2015) was a New Zealand art dealer and advocate based in Wellington.

Born in Raetihi on 21 September 1936, McLeavey was the son of Leslie Francis McLeavey and Elizabeth Theresa McLeavey (née McTiernan). His father worked on the railways and his childhood was spent moving around railway settlements in New Zealand's North Island, including Ohakune, Levin, Napier, Feilding, New Plymouth, Waitara, and Lower Hutt. He credited the beginning of his interest in art to a teacher at his high school in Waitara.

Jeremy Diggle, Professor of Fine Arts at Massey University, called McLeavey "the most important commercial gallerist New Zealand has ever had, effectively the pre-eminent publisher of modern New Zealand art in the past 50 years". His eponymous gallery is the longest-lived in New Zealand.

McLeavey started his art dealing career in 1966, showing art in the bedroom of his apartment on central Wellington street The Terrace. His first sale was a Toss Woollaston landscape. In a 2009 documentary about his life, The Man in the Hat, McLeavey stated that he set up the gallery to “feed the culture, and to expose the culture to people who didn’t know about it”.

In 1968 he opened a gallery in two rooms on the first floor of 147 Cuba Street in Wellington. Alongside other early emerging dealer galleries, such as Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland, Peter McLeavey Gallery played an important role in encouraging collectors to support contemporary New Zealand artists. Among his major sales were Colin McCahon's Northland Panels to the then National Art Gallery (now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) in 1978. This is now seen as one of McCahon's most important works.

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