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Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974)
A Coastal Landscape with Thatched Cottages
Oil on canvas, 51 x 66cm (20 x 26”)
Signed
Provenance: Purchased in these rooms, 1978 by John P. Reihill, Deepwell, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
Exhibited: Irish Art from Private Collections 1870-1930, Wexford Arts Centre, 1977, Cat. No. 33
Dr. S.B. Kennedy has identified this view as looking east
from Falcarragh towards Dunfanaghy, Co. Donegal. As
with so many of McKelvey’s works, it realises with great
fidelity the character and mood of the West of Ireland
landscape. Sable, ochre, and mist-green tones describe
the foreground which is strongly and confidently painted
while the distant peninsulas, in tones of blue-grey, assume
a remote ethereal quality.The disposition of masses is well
thought out and the light and dark areas are cleverly dis-
posed. Typically, McKelvey has included a genre element,
which consists of a donkey standing patiently by, while the
creels on its back are loaded with turf by two figures.
Though an excellent portraitist in the academic tradition, it
is for landscape painting, particularly views of the West of
Ireland, that Ulsterman Frank McKelvey made a national
reputation.
Born in Belfast, son of a painter and decorator, (it is inter-
esting that a number of other successful Northern artists
came from a similar background), he worked as a poster
designer before entering the Belfast School of Art. There,
he displayed an exceptional talent for drawing and won the
Sir Charles Brett and Fitzpatrick Prizes for figure drawing.
One of his first commissions, funded by a local business-
man, for the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, (now the
Ulster Museum), was to translate faded photographs of
Old Belfast views into effective watercolours.These subse-
quently proved to be highly popular with visitors. A talent-
ed portrait painter, he was represented at the
Irish Portraits
by Ulster Artists
exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art
Gallery in 1927. He first exhibited at the RHA in 1918 be-
coming a full member in 1930 and of the RUA, (then known
as the Belfast Arts Society), in the same year.
He was a most prolific painter, producing numerous river and
coastal views from Donegal, Connemara, and Antrim along
with many farmyard scenes. Significantly, the Exhibition of
Irish Art in Brussels, held in 1930, included no fewer than
three of his paintings, a measure of his stature. In 1937 he had
his first one-man show in Dublin at the Victor Waddington
Galleries and his work was also shown in New York prior
to World War II. An exhibition entitled
Contemporary Irish
Paintings
, which toured North America in 1950 also includ-
ed one of his landscapes. Although he worked in Northern
Ireland all his life, from 1951 he made frequent painting trips
to France.
Compared with those of Craig and other contemporaries,
McKelvey’s landscapes are less romantic, less concerned with
mood and feeling than with describing the essential visual
effect of a scene, although after the mid-1930s his work be-
comes more atmospheric. John Hewitt suggests that “in land-
scape his work harked back to an older tradition than Craig,
to quieter colour, to a kind of Constable-impressionism. It
is most effective in its rendering of evening light over level
estuary-plains, out of a lowering sky, or coming in from the
sea with water flooding across the sands.”
From a younger generation than Craig, by 1925 McKelvey
had reached the same level of recognition and became, with
the latter and William Conor, one of Ulster’s most prominent
painters. Furthermore, his West of Ireland views together
with those of Lamb and Craig dominated the field of land-
scape painting between the wars and perhaps more than any
other, approximated to a genuine Irish School.
€6,000 - 8,000
