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This is a biography of the art dealer and patron Hugh Lane. Born in Cork in 1875 – the descendant of a former lord mayor of the city – and after an unsettled childhood marked by much moving and little education, Lane made his way to London and apprenticed himself to an art dealer. His discerning eye for quality and unflagging energy and ambition led to his opening his own gallery soon after. His expertise and interests were wide-ranging; as a dealer he specialized in old masters, but he collected Impressionists and other contemporary artists and had an almost messianic drive to create public collections. This he did in South Africa, where he was responsible for the establishment of important public galleries in Cape Town and Johannesburg; and most famously in Ireland, where his Municipal Gallery and his contested bequest of Impressionist pictures made him a figure of affection and controversy throughout much of his adult life and decades after his premature death on the “Lusitania” in 1915. Hugh Lane was in many ways a very solitary figure – he never married and, though rumoured to have been homosexual, never had a documented relationship with a man. He was also a man of great social energy who befriended and sometimes crossed swords with the leading cultural figures of the day: Yeats; Gregory; Orpen; Augustus John; Rodin; Beerbohm; and many others.

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