Hugh Lane
Sir Hugh Percy Lane ( born November 9, 1875 in County Cork, Ireland, † May 7, 1915 in the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland ) was an Irish noble art collectors and dealers.
Life
Lane was born in Ireland but grew up in Cornwall, England. Even as a child, Lane was interested in art. While his brothers Playing sports, he spent the time to look at paintings and drawings. This preference shaped his life. Even as a youth he dreamed of having his own gallery.
He moved as a young man to Dublin where he wanted to open a gallery of modern art on a bridge over the river Liffey. The city administration pushed the front of a tie, since it was assumed that the dirty river water harm the pictures and the required building would affect the river panorama. In protest he made his collection of contemporary French, Italian and English works on a loan to the National Gallery in London. Ultimately, Lane fulfilled his dream by the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art opened ( the first public gallery of modern art in the world). In addition, he has become known above all for the promotion of the fine arts in Ireland.
In Cornwall Lane trained as a restorer of paintings. He became a successful and sought-after art dealer in London and was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Through visits to his aunt, the playwright and Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory Folkoristin in Coole, County Galway, he remained in regular contact with his Irish home, with whom he felt very connected. Abroad Lane emphasized the benefits of Irish art, he was also one of the first collectors of Impressionist pictures in Ireland. Among the works which he acquired for the new gallery, Heard & A. La Musique aux Tuileries by Edouard Manet, Sur la Plage by Degas, Les Parapluies by Pierre -Auguste Renoir and Édouard Vuillard La fireplace. The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art was opened in January 1908 in Harcourt Street in Dublin. Today it is called Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, better known as The Hugh Lane Gallery. Since 1908 the gallery was opened only as a temporary solution, Lane was looking for a larger and more suitable building that could hold additional pictures of the French Impressionists, he gedenkte to donate. After several proposals were resisted, 1913 developed by the renowned architect Edwin Lutyens draft the River Liffey about exciting art gallery found wide approval. Nevertheless, the project failed because of the increasing resistance of William Martin Murphy and published by him Irish Independent, so that Lane 1914 gave unnerved.
In May 1915, Sir Lane at a general meeting of the Red Cross took part, where he commissioned the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent with a portrait for him. On 1 May 1915 he went to New York City aboard the luxury liner Lusitania, to return to the United Kingdom. The reporters at the quay, which interviewed the prominent passengers, he said: "I have already asked the most beautiful woman in England, if she wants to pose for the portrait ." To whom it while carefully negotiated, he did not betray. His luggage included several waterproof boxes with paintings by Monet, Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian, which were meant for the Dublin 's National Gallery and insured four million dollars. He was accompanied by Charles F. Fowles, the treasurer of the interior designer Scott & Fowles Co., and his wife. On May 7, the liner was torpedoed by a German U - boat, the ship sank within minutes. Sir Hugh Lane was killed in the accident, his body and the boxes with the pictures were never found.
Lanes death was followed by a decade- long dispute between the National Gallery in London and the Irish side, as his will was not clearly formulated. In 1959, both sides agreed and the images are now displayed alternately in London and Dublin.
In the summer of 1994 claimed the diver Polly Tapson to have discovered in the debris field of the Lusitania the boxes with the paintings. Since the container is still sealed and were in an undamaged condition, it kept Tapson for quite conceivable that the precious paintings after decades on the ocean floor are still intact. The Irish Minister of Culture presented the wreck immediately listed building, which was the first time in a ship that sank less than 100 years.