Patrick Comerford
During my quick, overnight and all-too-short visit to Dublin this week, I spent a few hours on a sunny, summer afternoon, and again on a sunny August morning, strolling around the narrow streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’, between the South Circular Road and the Grand Canal. I even had coffee in the Bretzel on Lennox Street, until recently the last kosher bakery in Dublin.
Over the space of a number of generations, many cousins of my grandfather and my father lived in the rebrick houses on these narrow street in ‘Little Jerusalem’.
I have written in the past about the many members of the extended Comerford family who lived on Clanbrassil Street, which I remember as the beating heart of the Jewish community in even well into the 1960s, and which is recalled so winsomely by Sonia Harris Pope in The Irish Times last Friday (8 August 2025). [For replies, see here]
But over the past century or more, there were Comerford family members living in other streets in Little Jerusalem too, including: James and Belinda Comerford who were living at 43 Warren Street at the time of the 1901 census, and Robert Comerford (1856-1925), who lived at 17 Martin Street around the same time. Patrick Comerford (1899-1939) lived at 46 Lennox Street until he died in 1939. His brother Jack Comerford lived across the street at 1 Kingsland Parade until he died in 1949. Stephen Comerford (1924-1982) lived at 39 St Kevin’s Parade. Indeed, there were Comerfords living on Lennox Street up to at least 2011.
Although my father was born in Rathmines and grew up in Terenure, he knew these streets well as a child, where many of his cousins and schoolfriends lived. Many of these side streets had their own small synagogues, including those I have written about in the past on Lennox Street, Walworth Road, Saint Kevin’s Parade and Heytesbury Street, and some that I still remember with fondness.
I have been working on contributions to a new book on the theme of ‘childhood and the Irish’ being put together by my friend and colleague Professor Salvador Ryan of Maynooth. In one paper I have offered for this collection, I look at the fascinating childhood of the Levitas brothers, Maurice, Max and Sol, heroes of the Battle of Cable Street, the Spanish Civil War and radical politics in the East End of London. During their childhood, the Levitas family lived in a series of houses in Little Jerusalem, including 15 Longwood Avenue (1915), 8 Warren Street (1916-1925) and 13 St Kevins Parade (1925-1927).
Another interesting neighbour in the streets of Portobello was the artist Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900-1974). On that same afternoon stroll around Little Jerusalem this week, I went to see the house at 13 Stamer Street, between Lennox Street and the South Circular Road, where I remember the Kernoff family living until the 1970s.
Harry Aaron Kernoff was born in London in London on 9 January 1900. His parents were an interesting mixture of Jewish traditions and backgrounds: his father Isaac Karnov or Kernoff was a furniture maker from Vitebsk in present-day Belarus; his mother, Katherine Abarbanel or Bardanelle, was descended from a Sephardic family who traced their ancestry to Spain.
The family moved to Dublin when Harry was 14 in May 1914. He spent his early days as an apprentice in his father’s furniture business. An example of Isaac Kernoff's fine work is the Arun haKodesh or holy Ark for the Torah scrolls in Walworth Road synagogue, now part of the Irish jewish Museum.
He was still an apprentice to his father when Harry took night classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art under Sean Keating, Patrick Tuohy and Harry Clarke. He was the first night student and the first Jew to win the Taylor Art Scholarship in 1923, when Jack B Yeats was the judge for the award. The scholarship allowed him to he became a full-time day student.
Throughout his career, Kernoff worked from his studio in the attic of the family home at 13 Stamer Street. He refused to romanticise his work and was one of the few artists in Dublin at the time whose work showed a social conscience and an awareness of the plight of the unemployed, seen in paintings such as ‘Dublin Kitchen’ (1923).
He first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1926, he become a full member of the RHA in 1935, and he continued to exhibit there until he died in 1974. He also joined the Dublin Society of Painters in 1927 and had many solo exhibitions at their studio at 7 Saint Stephen’s Green. His work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.
A strong independence of style marked his work, reflected in his one-man exhibitions in Dublin yearly between 1926 and 1958. He developed an interest in the avant-garde and modern movements in the 1920s, but seemed more comfortable with realism and became one of the main artistic chroniclers of social life in urban and rural Ireland. His work chronicled both urban and rural life, with paintings of Dublin landmarks, pubs, shops and houses, as well as paintings of Killarney, Dún Chaoin and the Blasket Islands in Co Kerry, and Foynes, Co Limerick.
Some of his works also have Jewish themes, such as ‘Old Rabbi’, ‘Moses’ and ‘Wise Men of the East’ or ‘Rabbinical Conference’ in the National Gallery of Ireland, or his designs over the year for Jewish New Year cards.
He became ‘one of the main artistic chroniclers of social life’ in urban 20th century Ireland, according to Sarah McAuliffe, curator of post-1900 Irish art at the National Gallery of Ireland. His work is often compared to that of LS Lowry, and she says the two were ‘drawn to representing daily life as it was, without embellishment.’ She suggests Kernoff, as an immigrant, immersed himself in the bustle of Dublin’s city life to ‘feel as though he was an insider.’
A cartoon in the Palace Bar from 1940, ‘Dublin Culture’, shows Kernoff with the elite of Ireland’s art and literary scene in the bar that became an informal gallery for his work.
His work includes theatre sets and costume designs, portraits of literary figures and actors, illustrations, woodcuts and paintings of literary pubs and their characters. In his studio in Stamer Street he painted a range of portraits of leading Dublin figures, including WB Yeats, Flann O’Brien, Sean O’Casey, Hilton Edwards, Frederick Robert Higgins, Brendan Behan, James Joyce and Cyril Cusack, and other promnent figures such as Archbishop William Alexander.
A popular, humorous, and sociable man, he had a fondness for swimming and satiric verse, and he was often seen in the Palace Bar in Fleet Street and Bewley’s café on Grafton Street or scouring other pubs for suitable subjects.
One well-known painting, ‘A Bird Never Flew On One Wing’, depicts two drunken betting men with pints raised and, in the background, the names of Dublin pubs carefully and lovingly written out. There are many versions and prints that show two men cradling pints. One of the men, said to be modelled on a character known as ‘the Toucher Doyle’, has pointed ears and high cheekbones, leading to speculation that he inspired a visiting Hollywood designer to create the character of Spock in Star Trek, according to Kevin O’Connor’s biography Harry Kernoff: The Little Genius.
Kernoff created the decorative scheme at the Little Theatre in South William Street, and designed the sets for Dublin productions of Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ and Lord Dunsany’s ‘The Glittering Gate’.
He was a member of the Radical Club, a group of artists and that met in an era that Kernoff referred to as Dublin’s own ‘jazz age’, and of the Studio Art Club. Like the Levitas brothers, he was also actively involved in left-wing politics, and was involved in anti-fascist campaigns in Dublin.
Years spent as an apprentice to his cabinet-maker father taught him how to skilfully carve woodcuts for block printing. His woodcuts were often used in republican and labour newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s, and he designed the masthead of the communist weekly the Irish Workers’ Voice.
He was a member of the Friends of Soviet Russia, and was part of a delegation to visit Leningrad, Moscow, Baku, Tiflis and Vladikavkaz in 1930. His travelling companions included Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Charlotte Despard, David Fitzgerald and George Gilmore. During that visit, he was so influenced by revolutionary artists in pre-Stalinist Russia that he lectured about his trip when he returned to Dublin and organised a Soviet Poster exhibition.
He visited Paris in 1931 and exhibited ‘Metro’, ‘Paris’, and ‘Place de Tertre’, and had a sole show that year in Gieve’s Gallery, London, where he displayed ‘Ukraine peasant’. He had three solo shows at the Victor Waddington Galleries in 1935, 1937 and 1940, and. He exhibited at world fairs in Glasgow (1938) and New York (1939).
He began painting on a smaller scale on canvases in the 1940s and produced hundreds of miniature oil paintings. The first of his three publications of woodcuts appeared in 1942, followed by A Storyteller’s Childhood in 1946.
He was represented at the contemporary Irish art exhibition at Aberystwyth in Wales in 1953. He spent a year painting at Novia Scotia in 1957, and exhibited small watercolours in Lugano and Toronto in 1964 and 1965. His portraits were part of the WB Yeats centenary exhibition in the National Gallery of Ireland in 1965.
For many years he was a member of the arts advisory committee of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, and in 1974, shortly before he died he was made a life member of the United Arts Club, Dublin.
He was predeceased by his parents: Isaac Kernoff died at 13 Stamer Street at 71 on 11 August 1948; Kate Kernoff died there at 89, on 26 November 1969. His brother, Hyman Kernoff, who also lived in the house, died at 59 on 2 December 1960.
Despite being prolific in his work, Kernoff died a poor man. He never married, and he died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, at the age of 74 on 25 December 1974. He was survived by his sister Lena Kernoff, who also shared the house in Stamer Street. She deposited his papers in the National Library of Ireland in 1975. The Irish Jewish Museum unveiled a plaque in memory of Harry Kernoff at 13 Stamer Street in 2013.
May his memory be a blessing ז״ל
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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