I’m aware more than one reader knows more than me about Sir Hugh. He came to mind when a friend in California sent me an article by Moran O’Neill based on her book: Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915.
My grandfather remembered Hugh Lane. I suppose that Lane came to Jenkinstown as a guest of my great-grandfather or my great, great-uncle Gee. GP (grandpa) asked Hugh if he had a job. Good gracious no, was the reply. I just go over to the Continent and look around in junk shops buying Old Masters. If this is true Lane quickly sold those pictures. In 1904 he started buying Impressionist works by, among others, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Vuillard. This formed a collection of thirty-nine pictures which he was about to give to Dublin’s municipal gallery in 1913. Then he fell out with the City Fathers and gave his collection to the National Gallery in London which, not for the last time, looked a gift horse in the mouth. They rejected a few pictures and never hung any in the NG in Lane’s lifetime.
But as soon as November 1913 Lane changed his mind again and wrote a codicil to his Will leaving the collection once more to Dublin. Coincidentally or not, Lane was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1914, aged thirty-eight. He had been knighted in 1909. If I may digress, I believe Lane was the youngest Director until Homan Potterton accepted the post in 1980 aged thirty-three.
So he gave the collection to Dublin, changed his mind and lent it to London, changed his mind and gave it back to Dublin. Lane was a young man and this philanthropic ping-pong could have continued for another half century but fate intervened. Sir Hugh was a passenger on RMS Lusitania and drowned off the coast of Co Cork in 1915 when it was sunk by German torpedoes. London were in possession of the collection and the codicil, signed by Lane, had not been witnessed. A dispute worthy of Dickens ensued: London legally right, Dublin morally right. Dickens? Maybe Trollope or Potterton. Anyway since 1959 some of Lane’s collection has been permanently in Dublin and some is on loan and there the matter unsatisfactorily rests.