Hugh Lane and his Pictures

Thomas Bodkin

Hugh Lane and his Pictures

Dublin

Brown and Nolan; London: Geo. G. Harrup

1934

Inscribed by W. B. Yeats’ sisters, “To Aunt Fanny with love / from Lily Yeats / Lolly Yeats / Christmas 1938." “Aunt Fanny” is Fanny Yeats Gordon, youngest sister of Lilly and Lolly’s father, J. B.Yeats.

Hugh Lane, angered by the failure of Dublin to support the Municipal Gallery, had written a will in 1913 bequeathing almost forty paintings to the National Gallery in London. Then, only months before he died, he wrote an unwitnessed codicil instead sending them to Ireland. Legal proceedings validated the original will. The author, Thomas Bodkin, then the director of Ireland’s National Gallery, spent decades trying to get the pictures to Ireland. Initial steps were finally taken in 1959 to share the paintings between London and Dublin and only in 1993 were thirty-one of them permanently transferred to Ireland, with the remaining eight paintings continuing to alternate cities.