My friend Michael MacLeod, who has died aged 93, was an art historian with a strong interest in the work of the British artist Thomas Hennell. His book, Thomas Hennell: Countryman, Artist and Writer (1988), was the first to be published on his subject, and persuasively presented Hennell as an artist of rare achievement.

Michael was born in Eltham, south-east London, to Frances (nee Wix) and Norman MacLeod, a captain in the First Gurkha Rifles who subsequently became first secretary at the British legation in Kathmandu in Nepal. Michael and his older brother, Ian, consequently spent much of their early childhood in Nepal and India before they were sent back to Britain in 1936 to board at Westerleigh prep school in Hastings. Their parents remained in India, and the brothers did not see them again until 1940, when they sailed back to Bombay (now Mumbai).

Michael spent the next five years at the Bishop Cotton school in Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, a time he remembered fondly. He returned to Britain in 1946 when he was 18, and was called up for national service as a second lieutenant in the North Staffordshire regiment, with postings in Egypt and Aden between 1947 and 1950.

After the army he studied painting at Hastings School of Art, where the principal, the artist Vincent Lines, who had been one of Hennell’s closest friends, introduced him to the artist’s work.

Michael then did teacher training at Brighton and, in the early 1950s, became a teacher of life drawing at Staffordshire College of Art. There he met Audrey Thornton, one of his students, and they married in 1959.

He was a talented artist, particularly as a sculptor and printmaker, but was also interested in other people’s art. From 1964 to 1966 he studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and in 1966 he became lecturer in art history at Goldsmiths, University of London – a post he held until his retirement in 1984.

His book about Hennell was a brilliant and deeply thoughtful study, and was researched and written over a decade when those who knew Hennell, who died in 1945, were still living.

Michael was intellectually curious, diligent, modest and kind. It says much about him that he extended such a welcome to me when I began to research my own book about Hennell in 2013. My experience of writing that book was immeasurably improved by his support and encouragement, not to mention the delicious vegetarian home-cooked lunches that he and Audrey gave me. Michael was 45 years my senior, but the generational difference was absolutely no impediment to a lovely friendship.

He is survived by Audrey, their four children, Dominic, Lucy, Edmund and Daniel, five grandchildren and his younger brother, Keith.