Leading Irish landscape painter

Frank McKelvey was born in 1895 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During his career he was considered on a par with Paul Henry and James Humbert Craig, two of the most successful Irish landscape painters of the time. 

The son of a painter and decorator, he attended Mayo Street National School, after which he was apprenticed as a poster designer for David Allen and Sons Ltd. He attended evening classes at Belfast College of Art.

In 1911 he became a full-time student at the College, where he won numerous prizes, including the Sir Charles Brett prize for figure drawing (1911-12), the Fitzpatrick prize for figure drawing (1913-14), and a bronze medal (Irish art competition, 1917).By 1918 his work was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. He was appointed an associate of the RHA in 1923, being granted full membership in 1930.

In 1921 he was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society. He was elected as one of the first academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts when it was founded in 1930 and an honorary member of the Ulster Arts Club in 1935.

He became a full-time painter of landscapes and portraits, opening a studio in Royal Avenue c1919, exhibiting mostly in Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow (the Royal Glasgow Institute). His landscape paintings are mostly of farm scenes in Co Armagh , the North Coast and later Co Donegal , and are characterised by their fresh, bright palette.Brian Kennedy in his book Frank McKelvey (1993), commented, ‘He had a sharp eye and could, with apparent ease, penetrate the essentials of his subject and set it down with a matching exactitude’.

In 1924, George Russell (AE) had lamented that ‘No one has been powerful enough to create a school in , and when we look at an exhibition of the Hibernian Academy the general effect is of an art without roots’. Together with Humbert Craig, Paul Henry and Charles Lamb, Frank forms part of a group of painters from Northern Ireland who forged a distinct school of Irish landscape painting in the 1920s and 1930s, responding to the clarion call from Dublin for a ‘national tradition’ in Irish art comparable to the Irish Literary Revival. Amongst his best landscape paintings are On the Road to Kilmacrennan (c. 1935-6) and Roundstone Harbour , Connemara (1948). In Art in 1 (1977).

John Hewitt wrote of Frank,‘In landscape his work harked back to an older tradition than Craig, to quieter colour, to a kind of Constable-impressionism, with, maybe a hint of MacKenzie, most effective in its rendering of evening light, over level estuary plains, out of a lowering sky, or mist coming in from the sea and the water flooding across the sands, or, perhaps, on a smaller scale, children in bright dresses beside the little lake in a city park.’

Frank was also an accomplished portrait painter, and in Hewitt’s opinion, he was the most skilful, technically, of his piers in this genre, but that he ‘lacked any originality and, indeed, much aesthetic awareness or curiosity.’ Frank’s portraits include the mathematician and physicist Sir Joseph Larmour (1940) and Lord Mayor of Belfast Sir William Wallace (1962). His landscape paintings and his portraits of some of Ireland’s leading citizens may be viewed in the collections of the Ulster Museum , Queen’s University, Belfast and the Belfast Harbour Commissioners, and Cork, Limerick and Waterford municipal galleries amongst others.

Other sources:
Frank McKelvey: A Painter in His Time by S.B. Kennedy

Article by Karen Brown - www.culturenorthernireland.org

Art on view at:
www.rosss.ie/searchresults.asp?ArtistID=219
www.theoriel.com/artistdetail.asp?ArtistSurname=McKelvey