Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Lane, Hugh Percy
LANE, Sir HUGH PERCY (1875–1915), art collector and critic, the third son of the Rev. James William Lane, rector of Ballybrack, co. Cork, and afterwards of Redruth, Cornwall, by his wife, Frances Adelaide, daughter of Dudley Persse, of Roxburgh, co. Galway, was born at Ballybrack 9 November 1875. Much of his boyhood was spent in travelling on the Continent with his mother. Having learnt the technique of picture-dealing with Messrs. Colnaghi, whose firm (then in Pall Mall) he entered in 1893, and at the Marlborough Gallery, he set up for himself in 1898, aged twenty-three, and almost without capital, at 2 Pall Mall Place. His flair for recognizing the work of any given painter, allied with the surest instinct for beauty, quickly brought him a fortune and enabled him to indulge a princely generosity.
Lane had no special interest in Ireland till, in 1900, at the house of his mother's sister, Lady Gregory, in county Galway, he met William Butler Yeats and other leaders in the Irish literary revival. Attributing the absence of a corresponding movement in Irish painting to the lack of good modern examples, Lane proposed to found a gallery of modern art in Dublin, and began by commissioning John Butler Yeats to paint a series of portraits of distinguished Irishmen (continued later by (Sir) William Orpen). In 1903 he secured for exhibition in Dublin about one hundred of the best pictures in the Staats Forbes collection, and a large number were purchased as the nucleus of a gallery. Lane himself gave many more and induced artists to give; and when the corporation of Dublin provided a temporary municipal gallery in Harcourt Street (1906), he made the collection more representative by lending a group of pictures, mostly French, which he offered to give if a permanent gallery were provided. But after a vexatious controversy over a site, Sir Edwin Lutyens's plan for a building on a bridge over the Liffey being rejected by the corporation, Lane took back the loan and lent the pictures to the English National Gallery, to which he bequeathed them in 1913.
Lane acted as adviser when a collection of modern art was being formed for the municipal gallery of Johannesburg (1909), and he brought together a collection of seventeenth-century Dutch pictures for the Cape Town National Gallery (1912). In March 1914, in spite of his differences with the Dublin corporation, he was appointed director of the Irish National Gallery. He greatly improved it, and bestowed on it J. S. Sargent's portrait of President Woodrow Wilson. In February 1915, before going to America on business, he wrote a codicil to his will, restoring the French pictures to the Harcourt Street collection, on condition that a gallery should be provided within five years after his death. Returning a few weeks later on the Lusitania, he was drowned when that ship was torpedoed on 7 May. His intention had been expressed to several persons, but the codicil was unwitnessed: the National Gallery became possessed of the pictures and legally had no right to part with them. In Ireland it was held that the pictures should be restored to Dublin, if necessary by special legislation. In July 1924 a committee was set up to consider the matter. Its report, published in June 1926, affirmed, first, that Lane, when he signed the codicil, thought that he was making a legal disposition, but secondly, that it would not be proper to modify his will by act of parliament. It was subsequently stated by the prime minister, Mr. Baldwin, that the government had decided not to introduce a measure on the subject. Thus, at the present time neither London nor Dublin possesses what Lane planned and for a time brought together—a collection of modern pictures which for completeness and excellence had no superior within its own scope, and was unique as the expression of one unifying taste, a taste which artists recognized as approaching creative genius. Lane was knighted in 1909. He was unmarried.
[Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane's Life and Achievement, with some account of the Dublin Galleries, 1921, Sir Hugh Lane's French Pictures (pamphlet), 1917, and The Case for the Return of Sir Hugh Lane's Pictures to Dublin, 1926; personal knowledge.]