Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

www.adams.ie 25 Important Irish Art | 8 th December 2021 Born in Belfast, son of a painter and decorator McKelvey 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. Compared with those of Craig and other contemporaries, McKelvey’s landscapes are less romantic, less con- cerned with mood and feeling than with describing the essential visual effect of a scene, although, after the mid-1950s, his work becomes more atmospheric. John Hewitt suggests that ‘in landscape his work his harked back to an older tradition than Craig, to quieter colour, to a kind of Constable-impression. 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 landscape painting between the wars and, perhaps more than any other, approximated to a genuine Irish School.