The Artist Who Turned Dublin’s Pubs Into Galleries

Born in London to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Harry Kernoff moved to Ireland with his family in 1914. He would go on to spend a lifetime making art from his attic studio on Stamer Street, in a small Jewish neighborhood known as Dublin’s “Little Jerusalem.”

Though he was formally trained at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and regularly exhibited in the city’s Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, it was Dublin’s smoky, stout-soaked pubs that became his place of artistic refuge. To trace his career is to do a bar crawl through historic pubs in the city center.

Kernoff was known for drinking in these pubs, painting their patrons, and selling his work from their walls. With work that spanned from painting to block printing, Kernoff became “one of the main artistic chroniclers of social life” in urban 20th-century Ireland, says Sarah McAuliffe, curator of post-1900 Irish art at the National Gallery of Ireland. His work is often compared to that of famed British artist L.S. Lowry, as the two were “drawn to representing daily life as it was, without embellishment,” says McAuliffe. Last December marked the 50th anniversary of Kernoff’s death, but the publicans who display his artwork on their walls keep him sewn into the city’s fabric. “It’s gas where they can show up,” says publican Willie Aherne. (In Irish slang, “gas” means funny.)

Kernoff’s go-to order was a half-pint of Guinness, then called a “glass of stout,” says Willie’s father Liam Aherne, whose own father purchased the Palace Bar in 1946. “He was known well in the Palace,” says Liam, who was 17 when he started working in the pub, a 19th-century jewel with a stained glass skylight and low leather seats. Liam remembers the artist as a small man who “always dressed in a long black overcoat.” A scene that stands out in Liam’s memory is one of Kernoff chatting with Patrick Kavanagh, a lauded Irish poet. “Himself and Kernoff were friends,” Liam says.

McAuliffe suggests that Kernoff was drawn to pubs for two reasons. He saw them as “places of both social and cultural importance, in which poets, writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals, many of whom were Kernoff’s friends, congregated regularly,” she explains. McAuliffe also believes that Kernoff, as an immigrant, immersed himself in the bustle of Dublin’s city life to “feel as though he was an insider.”

Hanging in the Palace Bar’s back room is a 1940 cartoon titled Dublin Culture. It shows Kernoff amidst the elite of Ireland’s art and literary scene in the bar. “The great minds of the time used to hold court” in the bar’s back room, says Willie. The space became an informal gallery for Kernoff.

Liam remembers cycling to the Gresham Hotel to deliver one of Kernoff’s paintings to an American buyer who had spied it on the pub’s walls. It sold for 20 Irish pounds. His paintings now fetch tens of thousands in auction. Several years after Kernoff’s death, the artist’s sister sold off some of his portfolio. Though Liam bought a few artworks, “why the hell didn’t we go to a bank manager to get the money to buy more!” he laughs.

Many of the artworks he did acquire are now part of the decor in the Palace. There are several of Kernoff’s woodcut prints, as well as a wind-swept portrait of a woman. In recent years, the Ahernes found another “tattered” artwork by Kernoff in the space above the ceiling— “a caricature of a customer that drank in the Palace back in the day,” says Willie.

Pub patrons were a treasured subject for Kernoff, with the drinkers in Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street appearing in several paintings. The bar is immortalized in James Joyce’s Ulysses; it’s here that hero Leopold Bloom orders a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy, a meal that still appears on the menu today.

Kernoff would have come into contact with Joyce as a member of the 1920s “Radical Club,” a group of artists and writers that gathered in the heady years following the Civil War, an era that Kernoff referred to as Dublin’s own “jazz age,” McAuliffe notes. A portrait he made of Joyce, the writer’s head surrounded by psychedelic swirls that spell out titles of his stories, hangs on the wall of Davy Byrne’s today.

William Dempsey, who bought the Art Nouveau-style bar in 2019 and restored it, says Kernoff is remembered as “an elusive character” who didn’t share the hard-drinking reputation of contemporaries such as Joyce and the writer Brendan Behan. Behan appears with a flop of dark hair and a louche open shirt in a different portrait by Kernoff, a print of which hangs in Molloy’s pub on Talbot Street, one of Dublin’s last remaining “early houses”—it serves pints from seven in the morning.

Years spent apprenticing with his cabinet-maker father taught Kernoff how to skillfully carve woodcuts for block printing. Several of his striking woodcut prints dot the walls of Peter’s Pub, a snug wood-panelled bar with a 300-year history. “My father knew Harry Kernoff and that’s how he got them,” explains publican Enda Keogh.

Kernoff occasionally offered up his artwork to settle pub bills, though sometimes bar owners purchased them. In Neary’s bar hangs Kernoff’s most famous work, titled A Bird Never Flew on One Wing. Publican James Hardy’s father bought the painting from Kernoff. The price, 75 Irish pounds, is scribbled on the back.

Various iterations of A Bird Never Flew on One Wing exist. McAuliffe notes that it was not unusual for Kernoff to rework his compositions in different mediums. The painting’s background is filled with the names of more than a hundred Dublin pubs, while in the center, two men cradle pints. One of the pair has pointed ears and high cheekbones, leading to speculation that the painting inspired a visiting Hollywood designer to create the character of Spock in the sci-fi series Star Trek, according to Kevin O’Connor’s biography Harry Kernoff: The Little Genius.

A copy of this painting was reproduced on a 1986 poster celebrating Dublin’s pubs. This poster, with its miniature representation of Kernoff’s work, still hangs in many of Dublin’s time-honored pubs today, from the Brazen Head (Dublin’s oldest pub) to Mulligan’s, where a young JFK once pulled up a barstool.

In his lifetime, Kernoff recognised the virtue of Dublin’s pub culture. While the city has changed greatly since his death, its pubs maintain the same unique character that so inspired him. Should you stumble across Kernoff’s artwork on a Dublin pub crawl, raise a glass to his memory.

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