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Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974) THE

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:60,000.00 - 80,000.00 EUR
Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974) THE
Frank McKelvey RHA RUA (1895-1974) THE GOOD COMPANIONS, 1921 signed and dated [1921] lower left oil on canvas 46 by 56cm., 18 by 22in. Provenance: The artist's family by descent Exhibited: ’Frank McKelvey: Paintings’, Locksley Hall, the Carlton, Belfast, 8-20 October 1934, catalogue number 26 Literature: The Belfast Telegraph, 6 October 1934, page 11 Although painted in 1921, The Good Companions composition has been seen only once in public, at McKelvey’s first ever one-man exhibition, held at the Locksley Hall, Belfast, in the autumn of 1934. Reviewing that show, the Belfast Telegraph critic (6 October 1934, page 11) commented on the picture with its “two girls with rabbits”. The paper also admired the artist’s “delicate perception of light” in this and all his works. Although the figures cannot be identified, they were probably relations of the artist. The setting, however, is almost certainly the Maze, near Hillsborough, Co. Down, where McKelvey had taken a cottage a year or so earlier, although the picture would have been painted, from sketches done on the spot, in the artist’s studio at Rea’s Buildings in Royal Avenue, Belfast, where he travelled each day to work. The Good Companions shows the essential genre character that typifies so much of McKelvey’s art. Painted just four years after he left the Belfast College of Art, the picture shows the influence of A. R. Baker (1864-1939), his teacher at the College, who painted genre scenes of country life, rendered in a loose Impressionist technique of great charm. The feeling of space, of fresh air and the spontaneity of the moment seen to strong effect in The Good Companions composition are Bakeresque features that were to remain typical of McKelvey’s work throughout his career. His observation of the two girls who watch over their pet rabbits is sensitive and they are set down naturally and without any contrivance. The even film of paint applied over much of the canvas is characteristic of McKelvey’s early landscape work in particular, as is the device of using slightly heavier impasto to highlight, in this case, the figures and the rabbits, so as to draw attention to them. The handling of paint and naturalistic use of light, combined with the treatment of the figures, expresses the apparent ease of the artist’s technical abilities. There is, too, a clear delineation of space and sense of recession, from the sunlit foreground, where the narrative is set, to the blue-grey haze of the tree-lined middle distance and, beyond, the light blue of the far distant trees. All has been set down directly, with little or no alteration or over-painting. The colours and the paint surface are delightfully fresh and strong in hue, echoing the comment of the Irish Times in 1924 that with McKelvey painting is “an accomplishment, and his pictures declare it. One feels the sunlight in every one of them” (Irish Times, 7 April 1924, page 4). Compositions such as The Good Companions and others like it — compare, for example, McKelvey’s Family Scene or Children in a Park (both reproduced in S. B. Kennedy, Frank McKelvey, 1993, pages 15, 32 respectively), done at about the same time — place McKelvey in the tradition of artists like Walter Osborne or Dermod O’Brien, that is, of those who followed an essentially English tradition of plein-air painting derived, ultimately, from Constable. Besides possessing a superb technical fluency, McKelvey was gifted with an enquiring mind so that his paintings represent not only a sense of discovery, but are imbued with a constant freshness. Dr S.B. Kennedy, Belfast, October 2005
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