Lane, Sir Hugh

Lane, Sir Hugh (1875–1915). Irish dealer, patron, collector, and administrator, born at Ballybrack House, County Cork, the son of a clergyman. He spent much of his boyhood travelling on the Continent and in 1893 began working for Colnaghi's, the famous London firm of picture-dealers. In 1898 he set up in business on his own, and his sure eye, energy, and flair soon earned him a fortune. He had no particular interest in Ireland until about 1900, when through the influence of Sarah Purser and the playwright Lady Gregory (his aunt) he became caught up in the rising tide of nationalism in the arts. In the remaining years of his short life he became ‘the most important patron of the arts Ireland has ever had’ ( Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, 1978). He commissioned John Butler Yeats to paint a series of eminent contemporary Irishman (it was completed by Orpen, a distant cousin and close friend of Lane's) and he helped to found Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, opened in temporary premises in 1906. In addition to giving and lending numerous works to the gallery (and persuading others to do the same) he offered to bequeath his finest late 19th- and early 20th-century French paintings to Dublin, on condition that a suitable gallery were built to house them. This caused arguments with the Dublin city authorities, however, and he moved the pictures to the National Gallery in London. In 1914 Lane was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland, and the following year he was killed when the Lusitania (on which he was returning from business in the USA) was torpedoed by a German submarine. A codicil to his will expressed his intention of returning the French pictures to Dublin, but it was unwitnessed, creating a long-term legal dispute about their ownership. In 1959 an agreement was eventually reached whereby the paintings were divided into groups to be shown alternately in Dublin and London. This agreement was renewed in 1980. The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art was given a permanent home in Dublin in 1933, and in 1979 it was renamed the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.