Kenneth McConkey is Emeritus Professor of Art History and former Dean of Arts at the University of Northumbria. In the 1970s he conducted pioneering research on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and French art, looking particularly at the followers of Bastien-Lepage. He organised monograph exhibitions on the work of La Thangue (1978), Clausen (1980) and Lavery (1984), and worked on the revisionist reconsideration of French realism, The Realist Tradition (Cleveland, Brooklyn and Glasgow, 1980). He selected the British section of the Impressionist landscape exhibition at Cologne and Zurich in 1989 and organized Impressionism in Britain at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1995. In addition to co-authoring works on Sir Alfred East and Arthur Melville, his more recent books include The New English, A History of the New English Art Club (2006), John Lavery, A Painter and his World (2010) and George Clausen and the picture of English rural life (2012). He was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2020 to complete Towards the Sun, The Artist-Traveller at the turn of the Twentieth Century (2021). Currently he is guest-curator of Lavery. On Location, a major touring exhibition which opened in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, in October 2023, before travelling to Belfast and Edinburgh, where it became the National Galleries of Scotland’s Festival in the summer of 2024.
