Lane Bequest

The Lane Bequest is a collection of 39 paintings from the estate of Sir Hugh Lane. The collection is mainly paintings by French 19th-century artists, including several by the Impressionists, including masterpieces such as Manet's Music in the Tuileries (1862) and Renoir's The Umbrellas (c.1881), along with many more modest works. The collection is owned by the National Gallery, London, but most of the paintings are now displayed at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

Since 1959 the two galleries have arranged rotations of works between them. In 2008 the whole bequest was exhibited together in Dublin for the first time in several decades.

Lane was born in Ireland, grew up in England and elsewhere in Europe, and worked for most of his career as an art dealer in London. He died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, on the return from a visit to New York to finalise the sale of Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell and Titian's Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap to Henry Clay Frick; both are now in the Frick Collection.

For several years, Lane had been working on a project to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin. The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art opened at temporary premises at Clonmell House on Harcourt Street in 1908, and Lane commissioned two designs for a new permanent gallery from Edwin Lutyens. The plans were rejected by Dublin City Council, and the project which was to become the Hugh Lane Gallery was not fully realised at the time of his death. Frustrated at the lack of progress in Dublin, Lane sent his collection on loan to the National Gallery in London in 1913.

Lane's will of October 1913 also bequeathed his collection to the National Gallery, but Lane had been appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) in early 1914, and after his death a codicil dated February 1915 was discovered in his office which changed the destination of the bequest to the NGI in Dublin. The codicil was signed and dated but not formally witnessed and so it was legally ineffective, and the National Gallery took ownership of the paintings that were already in its hands, on loan.

In the following decades, Lane's aunt, Augusta, Lady Gregory, and a later director of the NGI, Thomas Bodkin, took up the campaign for the paintings to be returned to Ireland as Lane had intended. The Hugh Lane Gallery opened at Charlemont House in Parnell Square, Dublin in 1933.

Agreements between galleries

Works

London, 2021–2025; then Dublin, 2026–2031

Dublin, 2012–2026; then London, 2026–2031

London, until 2031

Dublin, until 2031

References

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