Nigella Lawson ‘will become a TV art critic and help judge food entries on Grayson’s Art Club’

Nigella Lawson is reportedly set to be an art critic on TV show Grayson’s Art Club.

The writer and television chef, 61, is thought to be appearing during Food week and will judge entries sent in by the public, reports The Mirror.

It comes eight years after she split from gallery owner ex-husband Charles Saatchi, now 77, following pictures of him grabbing her by the throat emerging in 2013. 

Grayson’s Art Club is fronted by Grayson Perry, 60, on Channel 4 and sees a host of celebrities join the show alongside famous artists.   

Others stars thought to be appearing on the second series, which starts on February 26, include Boy George, Derren Brown and Sue Perkins.

Fitting for her own background, Nigella is reportedly joining Grayson for Food week while singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor has signed up for Dreams week.   

MailOnline has contacted Nigella’s representative and Channel 4 for a comment.

Nigella was married to gallery owner and art collector Saatchi for 10 years although she hasn’t often spoken about being much of a fan herself.

However, in June 2019 she took to Twitter to reveal she’d been to a ‘beautiful and important’ exhibition by sculptor LR Vandy in London, saying it was a ‘deep delight’. 

Nigella’s former relationship was thrown into the spotlight in June 2013 after she was photographed being grabbed by the throat her then husband of 10 years Saatchi at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair.

Nigella has previously confessed she had resorted to drug use after being subjected to acts of ‘intimate terrorism’ by Saatchi.

He initially dismissed the neck-grabbing incident as ‘a playful tiff’, but later went to a police station where he confessed to assault.

The couple split a month later with neither making a financial claim against the other during their divorce proceedings, and as a result of the ‘undefended’ divorce, they reached a private financial settlement. 

Both are thought to have kept their own assets from the £150million they jointly owned. But only around £20million of this was Nigella’s, with Saatchi owning the rest, including the £25million Belgravia property, reports The Daily Mail.

Nigella later claimed she had to ‘start life again’ after divorcing aged 53 – including having to take out a mortgage and work to pay the bills. 

She moved out of the couple’s £25million mansion, buying herself a £5million townhouse in West London – with, to her horror, a home loan.

She said in 2018: ‘I had to start my life again at 53, get a mortgage at an age when you’re supposed to be paying it all off. I do have to work. But I only do a TV programme every other year. It’s not like I’m there all the time.’

Nigella also recently admitted she was naive to share so much of her private life when she first started on TV, saying she is now much more ‘guarded’.

The celebrity chef made her cooking show debut in 1999 with Nigella Bites, and in the opening minutes viewers saw the mother-of-two take her children shopping, bathe her son and whip up a meal in the unpretentious kitchen of her family home. 

It is a stark contrast to her most recent series, Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat, which aired last December and saw the chef demonstrate recipes in a kitchen that had been meticulously styled and dressed. 

Speaking on an episode of the BBC’s Food Chain podcast, Nigella said she ‘didn’t think it was odd’ to offer up so much of her private life in her early shows.   

‘I would now [think it odd], but I didn’t then. I suppose that’s the thing about when you start something – you have a certain innocence,’ she said.  

Nigella went on to add that she doesn’t enjoy interviews, describing them as ‘reductive and uninteresting’ and said she withdrew from them completely in the wake of the public breakdown of her marriage to Saatchi in 2013. 

‘I just stopped reading newspapers for a while, and I certainly stopped giving interviews,’ she explained. 

However she still feels the urge to share some parts of herself.  She added: ‘I’m probably less open than I was. It’s not that I don’t want to say a lot of things. It’s complicated. 

‘I think there has to be a balance between being guarded and oversharing, and whether I get that balance right I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any getting it right.’