Harold Harvey: Painter of Cornwall

About Kenneth McConkeyPauline SheppardPeter Risdon

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 Scotlands Festival in the summer of 2024. Peter Risdon retired from the Civil Service after more than 30 years at the British Library. Aged 57 he lives in north London with his wife Christine. He now writes biographies of British artists who are awaiting rediscovery and this is his first book. He is currently completing a 'life' and catalogue raisonne of the important Post-Impressionist artist Alfred Wolmark. Pauline Sheppard has lived and worked in Cornwall since 1972; a founder member of Cornwall Theatre Company her work has been seen as far afield as Berlin and as close to home as the Minack Theatre where her adaptations of classic stories for the Minack Schools Fortnight became an important part of the season's calendar. As a writer her concerns are universal issues set in Cornwall: Dogs in 1992 deals with the philosophy of freedom and crossing borders when a group of travellers are evicted from wasteland; and Dressing Granite 1997 about the survival of the individual. In 1998 she adapted Our Little Town by Charles Lee who was writing in Newlyn in the late 1890s and rubbed shoulders with the artists. In 2000 she adapted the Ordinalia (The Cornish Mystery Cycle) for the community of St. Just. She is also a member of Scavel an gow a group of Cornish short story writers.