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Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974)
Feeding Chickens at !e Back of the House
Oil on board, 35.5 x 44.5cm (14 x 17"”)
Signed
Provenance: From the estate of the late James Gibson
During the twenties, McKelvey regularly painted farmyard scenes, within which
a woman, often accompanied by a child, would be engaged in scattering feed to
surrounding chickens. Simply titled, examples include;
Feeding Chickens
1922,
Feeding the Chickens
late 1920s, this painting
!e Back of the House
and later
Farmyard, Co. Antrim
c1950-3 and
Bridget’s Hens
1968. Around 1921, Frank
McKelvey took a cottage at the Maze,Hillsborough, Co.Down and later after their
marriage in 1924, he and his wife settled there. At this residence the McKelveys
kept a large %ock of hens that the artist used as subject-matter for his pictures.
(In his papers he later wrote) ‘“It was through this opportunity that I was able
to study poultry in all e)ects of sunlight - a subject in which I have always been
deeply interested.” Indeed, it is for his compositions of hens, often picking for
food in the dappled sunlight of a farmyard, that McKelvey is most remembered by
many admirers. Occasionally the McKelveys paid a visit, sometimes for a holiday,
to the Murphy’s farm in County Armagh and there he painted numerous studies
of farmyard scenes, such as ‘
Feeding the Chickens’
and other semi-genre scenes.’
S.B Kennedy.
!e Back of the House
is an attractive work, carefully composed and
rendered with a bright palette, dappled sunlight highlighting the main elements;
the middle ground, the &gures engaged in their domestic ritual and the cottage
itself - the back of the house. Realist artists such as Jean-Francois Millet (1814-
75) would evidently have been an in%uence on the artist in his attention shown to
subjects drawn from everyday life and farming. Also the intimacy of the farmyard/
orchard setting was one that Walter Osborne would have explored in works such
Apple Gathering, Quimperlé
1883 and such genre studies would have interested
McKelvey, which he would then treat in his looser individual manner.!e farmyard
as a subject was one he revisited on many occasions for over forty years.
Marianne O’Kane Boal
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