Born: December 12th,1927
Died: August 20th, 2023
Gerald Kenyon, always known as Gerry, who has died aged 95, was one of Ireland’s best-known and most knowledgeable antique dealers from the 1950s until the late 1990s. His fellow antique dealer George Stacpoole recalls that “if you had a problem [sourcing antiques or valuations] Gerry had an answer; his knowledge was very, very wide, outstanding; there are very few people of that kind today. Really there are no dealers today of that calibre.”
From a family of antique dealers who had been in the business in England for at least three generations, Kenyon had his first base in Chester, in the northwest of England. The Kenyons operated from the oldest inhabited building in that ancient city, the Leche House on Watergate Street, a famous street of medieval buildings.
Kenyon was educated at Chester Cathedral Choir School and the King’s School in the city, but he was not academic and at 14 left to join the family business. His father Albert advised him of the bargains to be had in Ireland, as he himself had been coming to Dublin since the 1920s to buy up the former contents of large Irish country houses, whose Anglo-Irish owners had relocated to Britain after the War of Independence and the Civil War, from antiques dealers located on the city’s Quays.
Kenyon, who rapidly developed a keen eye, spotted one of these bargains in a house outside Chester in the late 1950s. It was an original Chippendale cabinet, which had been bought at an auction near Dublin more than 30 years earlier. His first bid for it was rejected, but he eventually secured it for £5,000, selling it on for £11,000. Some years later, the same cabinet fetched £3.5 million in Christie’s in London.
Kenyon’s first marriage was to Muriel Gaskell, with whom he had two sons. He later married Pat (née Johnson) and it was with her he first came to Ireland in the late 1950s, when he sourced rare Benin bronzes, after being advised of their presence here in some old country houses by the late art historian Cynthia O’Connor.
The couple fell in love with Ireland. Kenyon frequently bought from dealers in the Travelling community and went the length and breadth of the country to house auctions, building up a huge variety of stock which would be exhibited at the annual Irish Antique Dealers’ Association (IADA’s) annual fair in Dublin’s Mansion House.
Kenyon served on the council of the IADA for many years, twice as vice-president.
In 1969, Kenyon and colleagues including Stacpoole formed a consortium to buy the contents of Doneraile Court, near Mallow in Co Cork, the former seat of the aristocratic St Leger family, from its trustees. The sale was challenged legally by an American, Richard St Leger, who claimed to be the real owner of the estate, and was in the process of trying to refurbish and reopen the house to the public. Days before the planned reopening, the trustees gained an injunction in the High Court on the grounds that the house’s floors were unsafe. St Leger was unable to sustain his claim to the title, and eventually returned to the US, and the house passed into State ownership.
The Kenyons’ first shop in Dublin opened in 1965 on South William Street, in a Georgian house they purchased in a semi-derelict condition and completely restored. The business grew rapidly and expanded into the then newly-opened Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, growing in time to include three connected premises.
In the 1980s, the business moved again into another former semi-derelict Dublin Georgian town house at Lower Ormond Quay which they restored beautifully as both a showroom and elegant family apartment.
Kenyon had been joined in the business by then by his children Jonathan and Sarah. Sarah’s death following illness in 1991 affected him badly and his health declined. The Ormond Quay house was sold, and the business operated for a number of years from a mews on Strand Street behind Ormond Quay, before finally closing.
Kenyon is survived by his wife, their children Simon, Mark and Jonny, and by his sons Barrie and Clive from his first marriage. He was predeceased by Sarah, a brother Hugh, and his sister Rosemary.