Artists

Kernoff

Harry Kernoff, portrait, landscape and decorative painter was born in London to Jewish parents but moved to Dublin at an early age when his father set up a cabinet-making business there.
Having attended night- classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, he became a full-time day student there in 1923 after winning the prestigious Taylor Scholarship. Three years later, in 1926, he began exhibiting at the RHA,and continued to do so, every year with the exception of the years 1930 and 1931, for the next five decades.
Kernoff is perhaps best remembered for his depictions of Dublin and it’s people. ‘Kernoff is not only a Dubliner’, wrote John Dowling in Ireland Today in 1936, ‘ but he is a convinced towny. Shapes are what interest him, such as the mass of a building against the sky or a pattern of roofs and chimney pots, and his feeling for the city with it’s jumble of houses and shops and quays, it’s bridges and ships and machinery, is emphasised by a difference between his handling of these subjects and his more pastoral themes’.He was also a prolific portrait painter, painting many of Ireland's leading literary and theatrical lights and a generation of Dubliners including Sean O’Casey (1930) and Brendan Behan (1964). ‘I prefer doing a portrait in one sitting and retain freshness of vision thereby, and avoid a laboured work,’ he once wrote.In 1942 he published the first of three books on woodcuts, Woodcuts at 21s. – a limited edition of 220 copies.
Kernoff was involved with many theatre and literary figures, including Liam O’Flaherty and his brother, Tom, who founded the Radical Club. Through it he became a member of the Studio Art Club. In 1936 and 1937 he had solo exhibitions with the Victor Waddington Galleries. In 1935 he was elected an associate of the RHA, and in the same year to full membership. In 1974 he was made a life member of the United Art’s Club, Dublin.
He died, aged 74, on Christmas Day,1974, and was buried at Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin.
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