Landscape and portrait painter Frank McKelvey is one of the best-known Northern Irish artists of the twentieth century. Born in Belfast, he was apprenticed as a poster designer and attended evening classes in Belfast College of Art. He became a full-time student about the autumn of 1911 and had a distinguished career at college, winning numerous prizes. He opened his first studio in late 1919 or early 1920. By the mid-1920s he had firmly established himself in the art world of Belfast and Dublin and had begun to exhibit at the Royal Glasgow Institute. He was elected ARHA in 1923, a full member in 1930 and an academician of the UUA in the same year. His landscapes were mainly of Belfast and its environs and together with James Humbert Craig Henry and Charles Lamb, he was one of a group of northern landscape artists who helped create a distinct Irish school of painting.