Three works by Harry Kernoff in next week's auction of Irish art at the James Adam salerooms testify to a renewed interest in this Dublin painter. Almost exactly 10 years ago, this page noted that a new record of £11,500 had been paid for a Kernoff picture, and remarked: "this latest sale must cause some raised eyebrows amongst those who watched Kernoff's painting (primarily of quintessential Dublin scenes) languish for many years".
The record paid for a Harry Kernoff is £18,000, the sum made by the artist's Country Circus at Sotheby's in November 1992. Adam's, however, is obviously hoping to surpass that figure since one of the three Kernoff lots in Wednesday's sale, Dublin Cab (lot 24), dating from 1936, carries a pre-sale estimate of £20,000-£30,000. There are more modest expectations for the other two items, lots 35 [Back of Houses] and 91 [a crayon portrait of Oliver St John Gogarty], which have estimates of £3,000-£5,000 and £1,000-£1,500 respectively. Harry Kernoff was born in Dublin in 1900, the son of a Jewish cabinet-maker. After initially working in his father's business, he went to the city's Metropolitan School of Art, where a fellow pupil was Maurice MacGonigal. By 1926, Kernoff was exhibiting his work at the Royal Hibernian Academy and, except for an absence of two years in the early 1930s, he continued to do so annually until his death in 1974.
In his studio on Stamer Street, he produced portraits of many important Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats, Brendan Behan, James Joyce and Myles na Gopaleen. Sean O'Casey hated the portrait Kernoff painted of him and threatened to sue if the work was ever exhibited; however, the artist did show the work and no lawsuit was filed.
As The Irish Times observed a decade ago, Dublin street life provided the subject matter for a large part of Kernoff's output, painted in strong, bright colours. The skills of an illustrator inform his work, rather as they do the pictures of the American artist Edward Hopper. In addition to working in oil and pastel, Kernoff also produced woodcuts, three books of which were published in his lifetime. A 1951 notice in The Irish Times commented that "his woodcuts stand out because here his style seems perfectly appropriate to his subjects. Theo Snoddy records that after one exhibition in 1944, a reviewer felt that Kernoff had missed his vocation and ought to have painted stage sets and murals. In fact, in his early years, he had been responsible for some theatre work. Even during his lifetime, Kernoff's work did not receive as much attention as some of his admirers felt it deserved. He worked in a variety of media and was exceptionally prolific, making his pictures too widely accessible. In the 1950s, for example, he decided to speed up his output by painting oils on small canvasses measuring six by eight inches; hundreds of these mini pictures were produced, some of them selling for as little as £10.
Today, however, works by Kernoff are not so common on the market and their value has accordingly increased. The three being sold on Wednesday are part of a sale which also includes work by Yeats, Keating, MacGonigal and French.
The auction begins at 2.15 p.m.
