Researching Michael Sullivan

Born in Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland, Sullivan came to Canada in 1842 and settled in Kingston, Ontario. He was educated at the Regiopolis College and received an M.D. in 1858 from Queen's College. He served as Purveyor-General during the North-West Rebellion of 1885. In 1872 he was appointed Lecturer in Anatomy in Queen's College, and at the time of the establishment of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in affiliation with Queen's University, he was appointed Professor of Anatomy. In 1883 he was President of the Canadian Medical Association, and was an Alderman from 1863 to 1873 and Mayor of Kingston from 1874 to 1875. He later became a Professor of Surgery and Histology, and was a trustee of the Kingston Hospital and a member of the Ontario Medical Association. He ran unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of Canada in the 1882 election for Kingston. He was appointed to the Senate on the advice of John Alexander Macdonald in January 1885 representing the senatorial division of Kingston, Ontario. A Conservative, he served for almost 28 years until resigning in 1912.

Sullivan was born in Toronto, Canada, and moved to England at the age of three. He was the youngest of five children of Alan Sullivan (pen name Sinclair Murray), a Canadian mining engineer turned novelist and his wife Elisabeth (née Hees). Sullivan was a graduate of Rugby School and graduated from the University of Cambridge in architecture in 1939. He was in China from 1940 to 1946 with the International and Chinese Red Cross followed by teaching and doing museum work in Chengdu, where he met and married Wu Huan (Khoan), a biologist who gave up her career to work with him.

He received a PhD from Harvard University (1952) and a post-doctoral Bollingen Fellowship. He subsequently taught in the University of Singapore, and returned to London in the 1960s to teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Then he became Christensen Professor of Chinese art in the Department of Art at Stanford University from 1966 to 1984, before moving to the University of Oxford as a Fellow by Special Election at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He lived in Oxford, England. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 1973–74.

Sullivan was a major art collector who owned more than 400 works of art, including paintings by Chinese masters Qi Baishi, Zhang Daqian, and Wu Guanzhong. His was one of the world's most significant collections of modern Chinese art. He bequeathed his collection to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which has a gallery dedicated to Sullivan and his wife Khoan.