About Nicholas Lusher
Nicholas Lusher is the owner and director of The Lusher Gallery, a privately owned boutique dealership based in New York City.
Besides trading items of general interest, Mr. Lusher is considered by many to be one of the world’s foremost specialists in all genres of Bermuda-related Antiques and Fine Art, a field which he has embraced for his entire professional career of over 30 years. Prior to his permanent move to New York City in January, 2011, he operated two “brick and mortar” galleries in Bermuda, as well as holding the position of Trustee at the Bermuda National Gallery (where he guest-curated and lectured), and serving as a Trustee at the Bermuda Society of the Arts, a non-profit institution dedicated to Contemporary Art.
The roots of Mr. Lusher’s interest in some of the areas he now pursues passionately as a professional date back to the age of six, when he began to collect coins and stamps. By age nine he was enrolled in the Sherborne Preparatory School in the town of Sherborne, Dorset in southern England, a town which boasted more than ten antiques shops in a population of ten thousand people. One of these shops was operated by the fathers of Mr. Lusher’s two best friends and, by the age of eleven, Mr. Lusher was able to convert these relationships into an extra-curricular business enterprise, in which he bought and sold antiques from one store to another on a “not infrequent” basis, allowing the budding entrepreneur to earn pocket money used in the procurement of candy. At age fourteen, now at the Sherborne Senior School, he was summoned into his “headmaster’s” study one day and asked to account for a World War One-era tobacco jar that happened to be stored in his locker. The headmaster cautioned him to choose his answer carefully. Mr. Lusher explained that he did not own it; rather, it had been consigned to him, and he had a plan for its resale at a profit. Mr. Lusher then suggested that the headmaster call the antiques dealer and confirm his story. The headmaster, after making the appropriate queries, agreed that the story checked out, and set his quick-thinking pupil free to pursue his fledgling career as an antiques dealer.
At age 19, Mr. Lusher left Sherborne and began receiving instruction in the visual arts at Sotheby’s Education (now Sotheby’s Institute of Art) in London. At this time his career as a dealer began to gain traction. Traveling often between London, New York City, and Bermuda, he would acquire items of interest from the London trade and then sell them at his other destinations. His connections grew and, upon entering King’s College at the University of London in 1982, he was able to help defray the cost of his tuition, though he began to realize that his unique entrepreneurial abilities, applied to the world of art and antiques, endowed him with a far more valuable skill-set than any provided by a uniform academic education. He left the University in 1985 and returned to Bermuda, where, for the first time in thirteen years, he found himself spending more time on the island than off it. But he continued to develop his career as a trader, with the focus now naturally evolving into Bermuda-related Works of Art, and he became widely known in London for this area of collecting. Simultaneously, the trajectory of his career became tied to the corporate mushrooming of the re-insurance business in Bermuda. In 1988, Mr. Lusher met his future bride, Jamie Flon, and the two were wed a year later (happily celebrating their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary in 2015). In January, 2011, Mr. Lusher and his family left Bermuda and moved permanently to New York City, where he gained residency in the United States, and expanded his areas of trading interest and expertise to the Caribbean and the West Indies.
Some of Mr. Lusher’s career highlights are as follows:
In the early part of his career he was a contributing writer for, and publisher of, a book titled The Mapping Of Bermuda; on the occasion of the marriage of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, to Britain’s Prince Andrew, he was approached by the government of Bermuda to find an appropriate gift to mark the Royal occasion on behalf of the people of Bermuda. The gift which he suggested was accepted and presented; Mr. Lusher also prides himself in his involvement with almost every major sale of the renowned artist Reynolds Beal’s Bermuda oeuvre; in addition, he has had the honor of producing Bermuda's first exhibition of Karl Struss’ Bermuda platinum-print photographs; he has also sold several major works of the famous African-American painter of possible Bermudian descent, Norman Lewis; as well as selling work to every major museum in Bermuda, which includes working for many years with a private collector whose association with Mr. Lusher helped pave the way for a major posthumous bequest of historic Bermuda paintings which now form a core segment of the permanent collection at the Bermuda National Gallery.
Mr. Lusher’s family roots in Bermuda extend back, in documented form, to the 1630s (Bermuda was colonized by the English in 1609), and amongst his ancestors who were in the Arts is a well-regarded Bermudian goldsmith, silversmith, and jeweler, Benjamin Lusher (known to be active 1797–1801), and one of the island’s earliest and most enterprising photographers, “N.E. Lusher” (1859–1932).
When not devoting energy to his business and craft, he cherishes spending time with his family: His wife, their two children, and the family’s beloved West Highland Terrier, Samson.