72 / 196
72
56
Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895 - 1974)
Feeding Chickens
Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm (15.75 x 19.75”)
Signed
In
Ireland’s Painters
, Crookshank and Glin describe Frank McKelvey as painting with ‘great freshness and
competence.’ (290) Martyn Anglesea has written; ‘An interesting example of a kind of painter that has
received scant attention from art-historians. Frank McKelvey was Ulster’s primary anti-modernist painter...
Possessed of considerable hand skills and sensitive observation, particularly in landscape and seascape in
Antrim and Donegal...’ (160, Royal Ulster Academy of the Arts Diploma Collection, Belfast, RUA Trust,
2000) Clearly McKelvey has been influenced by international practitioners such as Jean-Francois Millet and
Irish painters such as Walter Osborne, yet he also painted with a confidence and certitude that was his own.
For S.B. Kennedy; ‘he helped to forge a new and distinct way of representing the Irish scene which is the
nearest approximation we have to a distinct Irish school of painting.’ (9, S.B. Kennedy, Frank McKelvey - A
Painter in His Time, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1993).
The farmyard was a subject the artist revisited on many occasions for over forty years. It was a scene he stud-
ied, sketched and worked en plein air directly. Throughout the twenties,McKelvey frequently painted farm-
yard scenes, within which a woman, often accompanied by a child, would scatter feed to waiting chickens.
Examples include; ‘
Feeding Chickens
’1922, ‘
Feeding the Chickens’
late 1920s, ‘
The Back of the House
’, ‘
Farmyard,
Co. Antrim’
c1950-3 and ‘
Bridget’s Hens
’1968. In 1924, following his marriage McKelvey and his wife settled
at the Maze, Co. Down. They had been coming to a cottage there at intervals since 1921. It was here that the
McKelveys kept a large flock of hens and these regularly featured in the artist’s work. (McKelvey later wrote)
“It was through this opportunity that I was able to study poultry in all effects 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.’ S.B Kennedy.
‘Feeding Chicken
s’ was most likely completed in the early to mid twenties and it is characteristic in style and
execution of this period of the artist’s practice.McKelvey presents a charming and somewhat timeless scene.
It is specific to the artist’s experience and yet universal in its character - it could be any farmyard in Europe.
Typical of McKelvey, he places his figures off centre in the middle ground of the painting to catch the eye.
Here the woman and child are fully engaged in their task of scattering feed. The young girl, in her white
dress connects visually to the white chickens within the flock, providing a narrative thread to lead the eye to
the centre of the work, to the buildings and the trees. It is impressionistic in style, with the artist’s charac-
teristic level of detail. He has a measured, yet apt approach to representing a scene, clearly evident here.The
palette is warm, bright, and summery. The sun highlights essential elements of the composition and pools
strategically on the ground. In the overall cut off composition, we can imagine the action on the peripheries
of this scene, the remainder of the open hay shed, the farmhouse/cottage, the whitewashed wall and trees.
Secondary action within the work includes the slanting cart beyond the wall and perhaps a lightly indicated
figure in a hat working beside the cart by the shed door.
Marianne O’Kane Boal
€8,000 - 12,000