Hugh Lane

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Hugh Lane (1909)

Sir Hugh Percy Lane (born November 9, 1875 in County Cork , Ireland , † May 7, 1915 in the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland) was an Irish art collector and dealer .

Life

Lane was one of eight children of James William Lane (1846-1909), an Anglican pastor , and his wife Frances Adelaide Persse, a sister of the playwright and folk writer Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory and a direct descendant of Dudley Persse (1625-1699), a 17th century Anglican clergy. Lane was born in Ireland, but grew up in Cornwall, England . Lane was interested in art as a child . While his brothers played sports , he would spend the time looking at paintings and drawings. This preference shaped his whole life. Even as a teenager he dreamed of having his own gallery.

Antonio Mancini : Sir Hugh Lane, oil on canvas, 1913

He moved to Dublin as a young man , where he wanted to open a modern art gallery on a bridge over the River Liffey . The city administration put a stop to this, as it was assumed that the dirty river water would damage the pictures and the required buildings would impair the river panorama. In protest, he made his collection of contemporary French, Italian and English works on loan to the National Gallery in London . Ultimately, Lane fulfilled his dream by opening the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (the world's first public gallery of modern art) in Dublin . He is also best known for promoting fine arts in Ireland. On July 22, 1909 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor ("Sir").

Lane trained as a restorer of paintings in Cornwall . He became a successful and sought-after art dealer in London and was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Visiting his aunt, Augusta, Lady Gregory, in Coole Park , County Galway , kept him in regular contact with his Irish homeland, with which he felt very attached. Abroad Lane highlighted the virtues of Irish art, and he also became one of the first collectors of Impressionist paintings in Ireland. The works that he acquired for the new gallery included A. La Musique aux Tuileries by Édouard Manet , Sur la Plage by Degas , Les Parapluies by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and La Cheminée by Édouard Vuillard . The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art opened on Harcourt Street in Dublin in January 1908. Today it is called Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane , better known as The Hugh Lane Gallery. Since the gallery, which opened in 1908, was only seen as a temporary solution, Lane was looking for a larger and more suitable building that could also accommodate additional paintings by French impressionists that he wanted to donate. After various proposals met with resistance, the design of an art gallery spanning the River Liffey , developed by the architect Edwin Lutyens in 1913, met with wide approval. Nevertheless, the project failed due to the increasing resistance from William Martin Murphy and the Irish Independent , which he published , so that Lane gave up in 1914, exasperated.

Death on the Lusitania

John Singer Sargent : Hugh Lane, oil on canvas, 1906

In early 1915 Sir Lane took part in a members' meeting of the Red Cross , where he commissioned the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent with a portrait for him. On May 1, 1915, he went on board the British luxury steamer RMS Lusitania in New York to return to the United Kingdom. He occupied the first-class cabin D-26 (ticket # 46101). He told the reporters on the quay who interviewed the prominent passengers: "I have already asked the most beautiful woman in England if she would like to pose for the portrait" . He did not reveal who it was exactly. His luggage included several watertight boxes containing paintings by Monet , Rembrandt , Rubens and Titian , which were intended for Dublin's National Gallery and insured for $ 4 million. He traveled with Charles F. Fowles, treasurer of interior decorator Scott & Fowles , and his wife Frances. He was spotted playing cards with Frederick Pearson and Marguerite Allan, wife of Sir Hugh Allan , during the trip .

On May 7th, the liner was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of southern Ireland, and the ship sank within a few minutes. Sir Hugh Lane was killed in the accident along with the Fowles; his body and the boxes with the pictures were never found.

Lane's death was followed by a decade-long legal battle between the National Gallery in London and the Irish side because his will was not clearly worded. It wasn't until 1959 that the two sides reached an agreement and the pictures are now exhibited alternately in London and Dublin .

In the summer of 1994, the diver Polly Tapson claimed to have discovered the boxes with the paintings in the rubble of the Lusitania . Since the containers were still sealed and in an undamaged condition, Tapson thought it quite possible that the precious paintings would still be intact after decades on the ocean floor. The Irish Minister of Culture immediately listed the wreckage , which was the first time that it happened on a ship that sank less than 100 years ago.

literature

  • R. O'Byrne: Hugh Lane 1875-1915. Lilliput, Dublin 2000, ISBN 1-901866-55-6 .
  • Des Hickey, Gus Smith: Lusitania: the chronicle of the ocean liner's last voyage . Translated from the English by Hardo Wichmann. Scherz, Bern / Munich / Vienna 1983, ISBN 3-502-16309-X .
  • AA Hoehling, Mary Hoehling: The Last Voyage Of The Lusitania . Madison Books, 1956, OCLC 1238304 .
  • Diana Preston: Have been torpedoed, send help. The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 . From the English by Udo Rennert and Peter Torberg. dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05408-8 .

Web links

Commons : Hugh Lane  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Knights and Dames: KIN-LYV at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  2. ^ Cyril Barrett, Jeanne Sheehy: Visual arts and society, 1900-21 . In: William Edward Vaughan (Ed.): A New History of Ireland VI: Ireland Under the Union 1870-1921 . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989, ISBN 0-19-958374-9 , pp. 475-499 .
personal data
SURNAME Lane, Hugh
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lane, Sir Hugh Percy (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish art collector and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH County Cork , Ireland
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1915
Place of death off the Irish coast in the Atlantic Ocean