Francis McKelvey was born in Belfast, on 3rd of June 1895. His father was William McKelvey, painter and decorator.

He studied at the Belfast School of Art where he had a distinguished career, winning a prize almost every year he was there. As a student he admired the landscape painters Constable, Richard Wilson, Corot and Harpignies, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites.

McKelvey was considered one of the most successful Irish landscape painters of the time. He was gifted both with a superb technical fluency and an inquisitive mind so that painting to him represented a sense of discovery which, notwithstanding the often repetitive nature of some of his lanscapes, imbued his work with a constant freshness.

McKelvey was versatile in his range of subject and use of medium. He also had a sharp eye and could, with apparent ease, penetrate the essentials of his subject and set it down with a matching exactitude. On a more critical level, however, it is reasonable to say that as a young man, having once determined his view of the landscape and his means of dealing with it, McKelvey subsequently varied his style and technique only slightly.