Kernoff, Harry was an Irish  painter adn engraver . Altough born in London he attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art at night and after winning the Taylor scholarship in 1923 he became a full-time day student, encouraged by established painters such as Sean Keating.

Kernoff showed a particular interest in drawing Dublin, and was one of the few artists at work in the city whose work demonstrated a social conscience and awareness of the plight of the unemployed, as revealed in such paintings as ‘Dublin kitchen’ (1923). Clarity of vision, careful craftsmanship, and a refusal to romanticise characterised his work, and in 1926 he began an exhibiting association with the RHA that was to last for the rest of his life; he was elected to membership in 1936. Actively involved with literary and theatre figures, he was a member of the Radical Club and the Studio Art Club, and at his studio (in Stamer St., Dublin) painted a remarkable range of portraits of leading Dublin figures including W. B. Yeats , Flann O'Brien,  Sean O'Casey Brendan Behan and James Joyce . A strong independence of style marked his work, reflected in his one-man exhibitions held in Dublin yearly between 1926 and 1958. When portrait painting, he preferred to paint his subject in one sitting to retain a freshness of vision and avoid a laboured work.

Exceptionally prolific, he was a portrait, landscape, and decorative painter. For many years he was a member of the arts advisory committee of the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, and in 1974 was made a life member of the United Arts Club, Dublin. Unmarried, he died in Dublin 25 December 1974.