44 / 164
44
35
Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974)
Children Playing by a River
Oil on canvas, 50 x 68cm (19¾ x 26¾”)
Signed
Born in Belfast, son of a painter and decorator, (it is interesting that a number of other successful
Northern artists came from a similar background), he worked as a poster designer before enter-
ing 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 businessman, 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 talented 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 becoming 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, Con-
nemara, 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 included one of his landscapes. Al-
though 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 ro-
mantic, less concerned with mood and feeling than with describing the essential visual effect of a
scene, although after the mid-1930s his work becomes more atmospheric. John Hewitt suggests
that “in landscape 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 recog-
nition 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 landscape painting between the wars and perhaps more than any other, approximated to
a genuine Irish School.
€6,000 - 8,000