In May 1915 a German U-boat sunk the Lusitania off the coast of Co Cork and 1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives. Hugh Lane was one of those passengers. He had been born in Co Cork in 1875.
Hugh Lane started out working as a picture restorer and then for a gallery in London before becoming a dealer; a normal progression that people still follow today. He was an unusual dealer in two respects: he espoused the French Impressionist movement and he wanted to give his collection to Ireland and a very fine collection too. His ties with Ireland were strong not least because his sister was Augusta, Lady Gregory. However, his good intentions were not entirely appreciated. He asked Lutyens to design a gallery but it was hard to find a suitable site in the centre of Dublin. The first plan was to build a gallery on a corner of St Stephen’s Green, similar to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. Then a bridge was proposed across the Liffey that would house the pictures in two galleries at either end – an imaginative proposal. Either would have enhanced Dublin culturally and architecturally but neither was acceptable to the City Fathers.
Lane lost patience with Dublin and wrote a Will leaving his collection to The National Gallery in London. Then he changed his mind and wrote a codicil leaving the pictures to Dublin. The codicil was unwitnessed and therefore invalid and that’s how things stood when the Lusitania went down. Legally the collection belonged to London, morally to Dublin. It wasn’t until 1959 that the National Gallery relented and now most of the collection is on the walls of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square, Dublin, where I saw it on Wednesday morning.