Patrick McCaughey (born 1942) is an Irish-born Australian art historian and academic.
He resided at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, where he studied Fine Arts and English Literature.
He was well known for his advocacy of abstract expressionism and of Australian artists, in particular Fred Williams.
[3] On return to Australia from a year-long Harkness Fellowship in New York, he was appointed as the first professor of fine arts at Monash University in 1972 and the Monash Department of Visual Arts had its first intake in 1975.
In 1988 he left Australia for the United States, where he held positions including director of the Wadsworth Atheneum (1988–96),[4] the chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University, and the director of the Yale Center for British Art.