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Frank McKelvey throughout his career was best remembered as a landscape and portrait painter. In his early career he was appointed to the firm of David Allen and sons lithographers. Lithography is a printing process in which a design is drawn onto a flat stone or metal plate, they are used for creating artwork for magazines and newspapers. Following this he enrolled as a part time student at the Belfast college of art and became a full time student in 1911. McKelvey met one of his most important influences at college his teacher Alfred Rawlings Bakers whose landscape paintings left an impression on him.

McKelvey began to concentrate on painting and opened a studio in Rea’s building on Royal Avenue in Belfast in 1920. In that same year McKelvey found a patron in a business man Thomas McGowan and he was commissioned to paint a collection of scenes from old Belfast. McKelvey’s work from the collection, Smithfield Market, Ann Street, William Street, and Bank Street are all now held by the Ulster Museum. In 1924 McKelvey got himself a car and began to branch out and paint in places such as Donegal with his close friend James Humbert Craig. McKelvey began to exhibit his work at the annual Belfast Art society, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Ulster Art Club, encouraged by Sir Robert Baird a proprietor of the Belfast Telegraph Newspaper. McKelvey continued to work well into his 70s before his death in 1974, creating paintings such as Port Salon and Children On A Beach, and being enrolled by the Belfast harbour commissions to paint a view of the queens bridge over the lagoon.

McKelvey alongside his career painting also played the role of a Father and Husband marrying Elizabeth Caldwell Murphy on the 6th of February 1924 at Holy Trinity Church Glencraig. They settled at the maze near Hillsborough in County Down where McKelvey had once rented a cottage. The couple would then go on to have two sons, Francis born in May 1925 and their second son Robert in October 1928. In 1926 the family moved closer to Belfast because of McKelvey’s work requirements.