Lord Palumbo has been Chairman of the Trustees of the Serpentine Gallery since 1994. He became Chairman of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Lord Palumbo was Chancellor of the University of Portsmouth from 1992-2007, and he is Adviser Emeritus to the Board of Governors of Whitgift School, Croydon. Since 1977 he has been a Trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1978-1985 he was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery; and from 1986-1997 he was Chairman of the Tate Gallery Foundation. He was a Trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Foundation from 1981-1987. Lord Palumbo was Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1989-1994 and a Trustee of the Natural History Museum from 1994-2004. Lord Palumbo has wide interests in the arts as a patron and a collector. He has both collected and commissioned contemporary paintings and sculpture, and he has a broad knowledge of the art market and of artists, collectors, and dealers worldwide. He has acquired houses in the U.S. by Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright and, in Paris, by Le Corbusier. Lord Palumbo is a member of the Conservative Party Arts Consultative Group, and he contributes to arts debates in the House of Lords. After leaving Oxford University in 1959, Lord Palumbo spent the next 40 years in the City of London in the family business of the development and management of real estate. He has a particular interest in architecture, and he has commissioned works by Mies van der Rohe, Sir James Stirling, Lord Rogers, Zaha Hadid, and Quinlan Terry. He was responsible for the development at Number 1 Poultry, in the City of London, by Sir James Stirling. Lord Palumbo was educated at Eton College and holds an M.A. in Law from Worcester College, Oxford. Lord Palumbo was raised to the Peerage by the Prime Minister, The Rt. Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP, (as she then was), in her personal Resignation Honours List, in 1991.