lavery on location: curator tour

Anne Stewart

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Anne Stewart is Senior Curator of Art at the Ulster Museum, National Museums NI, with responsibility for the Fine Art collections of painting, sculpture, Fine Art photography and time based media.  Anne began her career at the National Gallery of Ireland, joining the Ulster Museum in 1983. 

Coincidentally, one of her first projects at the Ulster Museum was the 1984 Sir John Lavery exhibition, also curated by Kenneth McConkey. At that time, Sir John Lavery was less well known and, in many ways, the 1984 exhibition brought Lavery ’out of the shadows’ and introduced his work to new audiences. 

"Some paintings from the 1984 exhibition are included in ‘Lavery on Location’ and it has been fascinating to see them ‘forty years on’ particularly the rarely seen portrait of Mary Queen of Scots ‘Dawn after the Battle of Langside’ from a private collection. ‘Lavery on Location’ also gives a rare chance to study some of Lavery paintings, which I had read about but never actually seen. It is particularly exciting to be able to display ‘Père at Fille’ the self-portrait of Lavery with his daughter Eileen, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris."

Anne has published on the Ulster Museum collection and curated many exhibitions including ‘James Stewart, An Irishman on the Grand Tour 1766-78’ (1999) and ‘WHERE’ (2021) a retrospective exhibition of Willie Doherty in partnership with Fondazione Arti Visive Modena. Her recent acquisitions include Left Right and Centre a video work by Cornelia Parker, who was official election artist for the 2017 General Election, Quiet (1881) by James Tissot, a Nativity (1515) by Baldassare Peruzzi and L’allée au bois (1876-80) by Renoir. Her interests include Italian Art and the Irish on the Grand Tour.

Kenneth McConkey

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Born in Belfast, Kenneth McConkey is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Northumbria University where he held the post of Dean of Arts until his retirement in 2005. A specialist in British and Irish art in the late nineteenth and early the twentieth centuries, he is the author of nine books, and numerous exhibition catalogues and articles. 

"I came to Lavery as child in the 1950s brought by my mother to the then Belfast Art Gallery and Museum. I left the city in 1966 as an art student and went on to study art history at the Courtauld Institute. Part of the story of British and Irish art that had not been told was the entente cordiale with France in the 1880s, and I set about researching and writing about the impact of French Realist and Impressionist painting. This led to exhibitions 70s and 80s on Henry La Thangue, George Clausen and others. I knew all along that Lavery, one of the most important artists of this generation, was lying in wait for me, and when Ted Hickey, the curator of what had become the Ulster Museum twisted my arm, I gave in to a large touring exhibition in 1984. After that, Lavery never left me, and in 1993 I published a monograph on him that was updated and extensively rewritten in 2010. I thought naively that I could move on, but within a year, two important caches of over 150 letters surfaced, along with a number of works that I had not been seen before. So, the full story, even after the present exhibition closes, remains to be told. 

There are so many good things in our exhibition that it is difficult to choose a favourite. One that has a special place in my heart, however, is the splendid little portrait of Walter Harris, The Times correspondent in Morocco. When my last book on artist-travellers, Towards the Sun, was published three years ago – he had to be on the cover."