CURRAGHS, CONNEMARA Harry Kernoff RHA (1900-1974)
Signature: signed lower right; inscribed on reverse with title, price (£100-0-0) and artist's address (13 Stamer Street) Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 66 by 97cm., 26 by 38in. Provenance: Pyms Gallery, London; Private collection ”He was not painting in any of the traditions of these islands”, Thomas Ryan PPHRHA has noted of Harry Kernoff. 1 Although he admitted being influenced by Seán Keating 2, Kernoff had a more subversiv... ve vision of the Ireland, the Irish Free State, that was emerging from centuries of colonial domination and the convulsions of civil war. In 1930 Kernoff visited the Soviet Union as part of an Irish delegation from the friends of Soviet Russia led by Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington. In Moscow he met members of the influential AKhRR, the Association of Revolutionary Artists, who believed artists should be “the spokesmen of the people’s spiritual life”. Kernoff was impressed. “All the arts are in a flourishing and growing condition,” Kernoff wrote on his return. 3 While it is tempting to read Kernoff’s landscapes and genre paintings as part of a perceived nationalist school of painting that might include works by Seán Keating, Paul Henry Maurice MacGonigal and others, it would be to ignore and important allegorical sub-text present in Currachs, Connemara. AKhRR believed that only working people could create cultural change. In portraying “the everyday life of workers, peasants and the heroes of the revolution and of labour”, Kernoff was in step with a AKhRR manifesto. 4 Currachs, and the men who worked them, appealed to Kernoff. Paintings of the subject were shown throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. Currachs, Connemara would seem to have been painted in the early or mid-1930s. This is an ambitious and epic painting. Against a backdrop of a rugged skyline, figures on the beach strain in honest toil at day’s end as evening shadows lengthen. The apparent naivety of Kernoff’s depiction of the middle-distance is further highlighted by the dramatic narrative being played out in the foreground where the painter creates and underlying tension with his sophisticated treatment of perspective. Our point of view is higher than that of the iconic female figure on the quayside. Yet, we follow her gaze down into the painting while also being drawn to explore the patchwork of walled fields which seem to fall more directly in our line of vision. 1. In conversation with the author, June 1998. 2. Radio Éireann interview 1973. 3. Harry Kernoff papers NLI. 4. Artists After the Revolution, 1917-1930 – Stanislav Zadora (Moscow 1930 – Mallard, NewYork) Eamonn Carr, Dublin, March 200 more
CURRAGHS, CONNEMARA Harry Kernoff RHA (1900-1974)
Signature: signed lower right; inscribed on reverse with title, price (£100-0-0) and artist's address (13 Stamer Street) Medium: oil on panel Dimensions: 66 by 97cm., 26 by 38in. Provenance: Pyms Gallery, London; Private collection ”He was not painting in any of the traditions of these islands”, Thomas Ryan PPHRHA has noted of Harry Kernoff. 1 Although he admitted being influenced by Seán Keating 2, Kernoff had a more subversiv... ve vision of the Ireland, the Irish Free State, that was emerging from centuries of colonial domination and the convulsions of civil war. In 1930 Kernoff visited the Soviet Union as part of an Irish delegation from the friends of Soviet Russia led by Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington. In Moscow he met members of the influential AKhRR, the Association of Revolutionary Artists, who believed artists should be “the spokesmen of the people’s spiritual life”. Kernoff was impressed. “All the arts are in a flourishing and growing condition,” Kernoff wrote on his return. 3 While it is tempting to read Kernoff’s landscapes and genre paintings as part of a perceived nationalist school of painting that might include works by Seán Keating, Paul Henry Maurice MacGonigal and others, it would be to ignore and important allegorical sub-text present in Currachs, Connemara. AKhRR believed that only working people could create cultural change. In portraying “the everyday life of workers, peasants and the heroes of the revolution and of labour”, Kernoff was in step with a AKhRR manifesto. 4 Currachs, and the men who worked them, appealed to Kernoff. Paintings of the subject were shown throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. Currachs, Connemara would seem to have been painted in the early or mid-1930s. This is an ambitious and epic painting. Against a backdrop of a rugged skyline, figures on the beach strain in honest toil at day’s end as evening shadows lengthen. The apparent naivety of Kernoff’s depiction of the middle-distance is further highlighted by the dramatic narrative being played out in the foreground where the painter creates and underlying tension with his sophisticated treatment of perspective. Our point of view is higher than that of the iconic female figure on the quayside. Yet, we follow her gaze down into the painting while also being drawn to explore the patchwork of walled fields which seem to fall more directly in our line of vision. 1. In conversation with the author, June 1998. 2. Radio Éireann interview 1973. 3. Harry Kernoff papers NLI. 4. Artists After the Revolution, 1917-1930 – Stanislav Zadora (Moscow 1930 – Mallard, NewYork) Eamonn Carr, Dublin, March 200 more
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
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