Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art

Hugh Lane was a millionaire art dealer and fanatical collector. Born in Cork, he moved to England at an early age and began his career at the age of seventeen, when he found a job in London working for the art dealer Martin Henry Colnaghi (1821–1908), who owned the Marlborough Gallery. A few years later in 1908, he had acquired enough knowledge and business acumen to open his own gallery in central Dublin. He soon became tired of running his Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and offered to donate the entire stock, worth millions of pounds to the city on condition that they should build an appropriate structure to house it all. The collection which at the time comprised major Impressionist works by Manet, Degas, Courbet, Claude Monet and Edouard Vuillard was eventually reject as the City Council allegedly could not find nor provide a suitable building. Lane was furious and, in a temper, made an agreement with the National Gallery in London to give them his collection instead. Many important artists and writers including W. B. Yeats, were equally infuriated by the government's ineptitude. Yeats wrote a series of angry poems lambasting them for their failure to find a place to house such magnificent works. Lane soon after changed his mind and decided to leave his collection to Dublin after all. He ordered his will changed but had not yet had it signed and witnessed when he was killed in 1915 aboard the ocean liner Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German submarine. Not until November 1959 did the British and Irish governments agree to divide the collection into two groups that would alternate between London and Dublin for five-year periods. After a new round of negotiations in 1979 some thirty pictures remained in Dublin for the next fourteen years. Then in 1993 the Hugh Lane Gallery as it had been named in 1977, won the ownership of thirty-one pictures, while the other eight alternated between the two cities at intervals. Nearly a century after Lane's death the matter is technically unresolved but the agreement seems to work to everyone's favour. His other legacies included the founding of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Michaelis Collection in Cape Town.

Today, the gallery, which celebrated its 100-year anniversary during 2008, not only houses the aforementioned works but also has sculptures by Rodin, a collection of Harry Clarke stained glass, and numerous works by modern and contemporary Irish and international artists. These include Walter Osborne, William Orpen, Jack B.Yeats, Mary Swanzy, Norah McGuinness, William Scott, Patrick Scott, Louis le Brocquy, Philip Guston, Elizabeth Magill, Sean Scully, Brian Maguire, Dorothy Cross, Joseph Beuys, and Ellsworth Kelly. One room even holds the untidy studio of the Irish born painter Francis Bacon, which the gallery purchased in 2001 from London and moved to Dublin piece by piece, where it was reconstructed behind glass. Even the original dust in his studio was relocated. In 1977 it was renamed the 'Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane', but is often simply called 'The Hugh Lane'. In 2004 the gallery was closed for refurbishment which lasted for a period of two years.