Lane, Sir Hugh

Lane, Sir Hugh (b Ballybrack House, Co. Cork, 9 Nov. 1875; d at sea, 7 May 1915).
Irish dealer, patron, collector, and administrator. He made his fortune as a picture dealer in London and 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. He commissioned John Butler Yeats to paint a series of eminent contemporary Irishmen (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, he offered to bequeath his finest late 19th- and early 20th-century French paintings to Dublin, if a suitable gallery were built to house them. This caused arguments with Dublin's city authorities, however, and he moved the pictures to the National Gallery in London. Lane 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 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 arrangement has subsequently been somewhat modified. 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.