McCann, George Galway (1909–67), artist and sculptor, was born 14 February 1909 at 138 Highfield Road, Belfast, son of David Galway McCann, monumental sculptor, and Elizabeth (née Crawford) McCann. He studied at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and at the Belfast School of Art, which he first entered in 1926. In 1929 he won a major scholarship to London's Royal College of Art and he graduated from there in 1932, winning a special prize. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1932 and taught at Royal School, Armagh, for the next six years, where he designed a mural representing the school (having deteriorated, it was destroyed by building operations in 1988). Some time during this period, he also taught at Portadown College. In 1935 he sculpted ‘Education reclining below the tree of knowledge’, which is above the entrance of Avoneil primary school in Belfast. During this period, he created a number of works which are on display in Armagh county museum, which include a chalk portrait of George Paterson (1888–1971); a portrait head in plaster of his wife, Mercy Hunter (qv); ‘Reclining figure’ in stone; an oil entitled ‘Head of Christ’; and an abstract oil on hardboard. Leaving Armagh in 1938, he was appointed to lecture on sculpture at Belfast College of Art. On the outbreak of the second world war, however, he joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and held the rank of captain, serving in Burma and India. In 1942 his short-story collection, Sparrows round my brow, was published under the pseudonym ‘George Galway’ by the Mourne Press of Newcastle, Co. Down, and in later years he made some broadcasts and contributed to several magazines and journals. Returning to Ulster after the war, he taught at Sullivan Upper School, Holywood, Co. Down, for a short time. In 1951 the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) commissioned two sculptures by MacCann, ‘The four just men’ and ‘St Columba’, both of which are in the Guildhall, Derry city, having survived the bombing of that building. In the same year he painted murals for the Northern Ireland section of the Festival of Britain in London and for the exhibition in Castlereagh, a suburb of Belfast. He also produced sculptures that year for the British Industries Fair. His work was included at CEMA's exhibition of sculpture at Belfast's Museum and Art Gallery in 1953. In 1955 he began work as a freelance designer and painter, and in this capacity he worked for the Colchester repertory company in Portstewart, Co. Londonderry, and Belfast's Group and Lyric Theatres. In this period he also painted a number of murals for pubs, restaurants, and schools in the region. In 1958 his work was represented in a Piccolo Gallery show of drawings of people in Belfast. From this time onwards, he did little or no sculpting. He and his wife designed costumes for the Patricia Mulholland Irish ballet, and some of these creations can still be seen in the Grand Opera House, Belfast. In 1963 he made the death mask of his old friend and well known Irish poet, Louis MacNeice (qv), a copy of which is in the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Two years later, he had a one-person show at the New Gallery in Belfast, which included paintings, drawings, welded forms, and a construction in wood and paint. In 1966 he was elected an associate of the Royal Ulster Academy. Some of his work was displayed at the Irish Exhibition of Art in Dublin in the same year. He died at Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital on 4 November 1967.
He married (1937) Mercy Hunter (qv), another artist, later awarded an MBE, whose mother was Russian and whose father, the Rev. William Hunter, was an Irish presbyterian missionary. George and Mercy appear to have had no children. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland staged a memorial exhibition of MacCann's work in 1968, which included some of his paintings, drawings, and sculpture.