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Frank McKelvey (1895-1974), Road to Donegal, Oil on Board, 11.5 by 17 in., Private Collection |
Frank McKelvey, On the Way to Muckish, Co. Donegal, c.
1940, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 23 in., Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland |
| Frank McKelvey, Donegal Landscape with Cottage, Oil on Canvas Board,
14 by 20 in., Private collection |
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Frank McKelvey, On the Road to Kilmacrennan (a Gypsy Caravan), c. 1935-36, Oil on Canvas, 28 by 36 in.,
Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland
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Frank McKelvey, Glenveagh Hills, County
Donegal, 1929, Oil on Board, 11.5
by 16.5 in., Private Collection
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| The Painter |
A painter friend of mine spent a week in Ireland before going on a painting trip to Brittany in September. She visited an old friend of hers, a transplanted American, who lives with her husband and their pet Collie in a tiny village in the picturesque countryside two hours from Dublin. About all this dot on the map has for amenities are a church, a bar/grocery store, and four cemeteries.
The husband plays the tin whistle in pubs and is a tour guide. He said groups of artists are the worst. They are always dropping their wet canvases on the ground or on the bus, and generally causing a fuss with all their equipment.
My friend said it rained constantly when she was there. But the photos she took of that unspoiled countryside, with a prominent mountain in the distance, indicate it would have been a real treat to do some landscape painting there.
Despite Ireland’s typically rainy weather, many beautiful landscapes have been painted by the natives. I just came across the work of Frank McKelvey (1895-1974), a leading figure in the so-called Irish School of the 1920s and ‘30s.
An art reviewer in 1925 wrote that McKelvey’s “views and conversation are as fresh and bright as his pictures. In his own words, ‘Painting is all great fun’, and to see him at work you quite believe him.”
McKelvey was a highly accomplished and critically acclaimed landscape painter. He also painted quite a few portraits of distinguished Irishmen, but those works are far less noteworthy than his landscapes.
Born in Belfast, the son of a painting contractor and decorator, he was a poster designer before attending the Belfast School of Art, where he won prizes for figure drawing in 1912 and 1914. By 1918 his work was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and in 1921 he was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society.
The young McKelvey became a full-time painter of landscapes and portraits around 1919, when he was just 24 years of age. His landscape paintings are typically of farm scenes in County Armagh, the North Coast, and later in County Donegal, all lovely places I’ve never visited and probably never will, since I barely leave my New York City apartment anymore. Going to New Jersey is like crossing the Atlantic Ocean for me.
In 1936, McKelvey had a one-man show where three of his landscapes were purchased as a wedding present for Queen Juliana of the Netherlands by Dutch people living in Ireland.
He was made a full member of the RHA in 1930 and was elected as one of the first academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts when it was founded that same year. McKelvey continued exhibiting at the RHA every year for the next fifty-five years, showing from three to eight works each time, right up until he departed Ireland’s earthly paradise.
Among his many portraits, McKelvey also created 13 large-scale portrait drawings of American Presidents with Ulster lineage, which were presented to the Belfast Museum & Art Gallery in 1931.
His work can be seen in the Royal Collection at The Hague and in many places in Ireland, including the Crawford Gallery, Cork; Queen's University, Belfast; the Ulster Museum and the Masonic Hall in Dublin. In London the National Maritime Museum houses one of his paintings depicting an Aran Island currach (wooden-framed Irish boat stretched with animal hides).
McKelvey had just turned 79 when he died on June 30, 1974 in his native Belfast, after a lifetime of painting views of the towns and surrounding countryside he knew so well. Like many gifted oil painters, he didn’t have to travel very far to get where he was meant to go.
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Frank McKelvey, Children on the Shore, Oil on Board, 15 by
20 in., Private Collection
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Frank McKelvey, A Summer's Day, Oil on Board, 15 by 20
in., Private Collection
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