Hugh Lane Gallery

A collection built almost entirely on the taste of two men born fifty years apart: Sir Hugh Lane, whose Impressionist bequest still divides its most famous paintings between Dublin and London under a 2021 partnership agreement, and Francis Bacon, whose entire working studio was moved from London to Dublin wall by wall in 1998 and remains the most complete surviving record of any major twentieth-century painter's working environment. Around both sit later gifts that have nothing to do with either man: Sean Scully's own 2006 donation of paintings spanning his career, and a stained-glass collection built around Harry Clarke, Wilhelmina Geddes and Evie Hone, three of the central figures in Irish stained glass's early-twentieth-century revival.

Before it held a single painting, Charlemont House was already one of the grandest addresses in Dublin. James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont, a collector of antiquities and a patriot who commanded the Irish Volunteers, commissioned the neoclassical architect Sir William Chambers to design his town house on the north side of what was then Rutland Square, now Parnell Square. Work began around 1763, but Lord Charlemont's periodic shortages of money meant the house was not finished until at least 1775. Chambers solved the problem of a deep, narrow site by setting the house back behind a shallow forecourt where carriages could draw up, an unusually grand device for a city dwelling, and gave the brick facade limestone rustication at ground level in the Palladian manner.

Inside, the reception rooms wrap around a core of service stairs, and several of Chambers's original features survive: a chimneypiece in the entrance hall inspired by ancient Rome, whose design he had settled as early as 1762, a year before construction began (his drawing for it is now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York); a second chimneypiece with waterleaf capitals and a vase-and-ram's-head motif; a principal staircase with its original wrought-iron balustrade of foliated scrolls and lion masks; and, on the first floor, coved ceilings by Chambers and a marble chimneypiece by the Italian craftsman Pietro Bossi, its dancing figures drawn from the 'Etruscan style' then fashionable after the Pompeii and Herculaneum excavations. At the rear of the house, rooms since demolished once held Lord Charlemont's own collection of ancient coins and medals in a cabinet Chambers designed specifically for it (the cabinet itself now stands in Somerset House, London); the outline of where it stood is still marked in the stuccowork of the ceiling in what is today the Chambers Room, hung with paintings by Francis Bacon. Contemporaries called Charlemont House the best town house in Dublin, ranking it with Powerscourt House, Belvedere House and Leinster House, now the seat of the Irish parliament.

The gallery takes its name, and its founding collection, from Sir Hugh Lane, an Irish-born art dealer and collector who in 1908 established the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art at 17 Harcourt Street, Dublin, the first known public gallery of modern art anywhere in the world. Lane was ambitious for it: in 1904 he had already bought Manet's Portrait of Eva Gonzales for 100,000 francs, a purchase that made his seriousness as a collector unmistakable, and he pressed Dublin Corporation to build a permanent home for the gallery designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, spanning the River Liffey near the Ha'penny Bridge. The scheme was fought over in public through 1913, opposed on cost grounds by the businessman William Martin Murphy and defended by labour organisations who accused its opponents of trying to deny working Dubliners access to art; it was never built.

Lane died on 7 May 1915, a passenger on the Lusitania when a German U-boat sank it off the Cork coast. His will left his personal collection of 39 modern paintings to the National Gallery, London, but a codicil found afterwards in his desk at the National Gallery of Ireland, where he had been director, asked that the pictures go to Dublin instead if a permanent gallery existed for them within five years. The codicil was signed but not witnessed, and so was not legally valid: the National Gallery, London became the paintings' owner. The Municipal Gallery itself found its permanent home only in 1929, when Charlemont House was chosen to hold it; the house's rear gardens became the site of new gallery rooms designed by the Dublin City Architect, Horace T. O'Rourke, and on 19 June 1933 Charlemont House formally reopened as the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, known today as the Hugh Lane Gallery. A 2006 renovation added a further extension by the Dublin firm Gilroy McMahon.

The invalid codicil left Lane's 39 paintings, among them major Impressionist works by Renoir, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Degas, in London while the gallery he had founded them for stood in Dublin without them. It took more than four decades for the two institutions to find any accommodation. In the late 1950s Sir Denis Mahon, a National Gallery trustee of Irish descent, brokered a compromise: a 1959 agreement, implemented in the early 1960s, split the paintings into two groups that alternated between London and Dublin until 1979, after which 27 of the 39 settled on long-term loan in Dublin. From 1993 a further eight paintings rotated between the two cities in groups of four on a six-year cycle, with the remaining four staying in London throughout.

In February 2021 the two galleries agreed a new ten-year partnership, explicitly framed by both directors as moving on from the arrangements of the previous fifty years. Under it, ten paintings now rotate in two groups of five, each shown for five years in one city before moving to the other; two works remain permanently in London. Every painting in the group is now labelled to record both institutions together. Dr Barbara Dawson, the Hugh Lane Gallery's director, called the new agreement an acknowledgement of the gallery's own role in the paintings' history; the National Gallery's director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, called it a strengthening of a partnership Lane himself had wanted, to let audiences in both Dublin and London enjoy the collection he built. It remains, after more than a century, a divided bequest: not a dispute any longer, but a settlement that still keeps part of what Lane meant for Dublin permanently in London.

Francis Bacon, born in Dublin in 1909 and raised in County Kildare, left Ireland at sixteen and made his career in London, where from 1961 until his death in 1992 he lived and worked at 7 Reece Mews, a converted coach house near South Kensington. In 1998 the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson, secured the studio's donation from Bacon's heir John Edwards and from Brian Clarke, executor of the artist's estate. Her plan was not to select highlights from the room but to remove it whole: every object without exception, the dust included, and the walls, door, floor and ceiling themselves.

A team of archaeologists, conservators and curators spent that August mapping the tiny room, tagging and packing more than 7,000 items before dismantling the fabric of the space around them. Cataloguing and digitisation took a further three years. What survived includes roughly 570 books and catalogues, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 pages torn from books, 2,000 artist's materials, 70 drawings, and correspondence, magazines and vinyl records besides. The reconstructed studio opened to the public on the gallery's Ground Floor in May 2001, in a purpose-built compound that also holds an audiovisual room and a gallery of Bacon's own unfinished paintings, among them the canvas he was working on when he died. The reconstruction has since fed nearly every retrospective of Bacon's work with primary material found nowhere else, and it remains, along with the rest of the collection, fully protected on site through the current closure, though not open to visitors.

Beyond the Lane Bequest itself, the gallery's Impressionist holdings run to further paintings the Lane Bequest terms never touched, and to a strand of nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish and international art that the gallery's own collection page groups under Impressionism, expressionism and the contemporary. Auguste Rodin's The Age of Bronze, a life-size male nude cast in 1877 and so nakedly naturalistic on first exhibition that critics accused Rodin of casting it directly from a living model, entered the collection in the Lane Gift of 1912. In the twentieth century the gallery built two further strands that have nothing to do with Lane at all: a room of stained glass built around windows by Harry Clarke, the artist most identified worldwide with the early-twentieth-century revival of Irish stained glass, shown with work by his contemporaries Wilhelmina Geddes and Evie Hone; and, from 2006, a dedicated room of paintings the Dublin-born painter Sean Scully gave directly to the gallery of his birth city, spanning nearly three decades of his own work. Dublin City Council's own account of the collection also names Niki de Saint Phalle's large-scale sculpture Big Bird among its contemporary holdings.

On 28 September 2025 the Hugh Lane Gallery closed its doors to facilitate a refurbishment of the original 1930s wing to twenty-first-century museum standards of security and environmental control, work Dublin City Council and the gallery both say is expected to keep the building shut for at least three years. The project runs alongside construction of a new Dublin City library on the same square, with a direct link planned between the two, and is part of a wider plan to remake Parnell Square North as a cultural quarter. Of the roughly 40 permanent staff, the gallery says all keep their posts, either continuing to manage the collection's care, conservation and 24-hour security offsite, or redeployed temporarily elsewhere in Dublin City Council.

The collection itself has been dispersed rather than boxed and left. A number of important works are now on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland, which has hung a selection under the title Highlights from Hugh Lane Gallery in its Rooms 47 and 48; other pieces have gone to the Office of Public Works at Dublin Castle, to Farmleigh House and to Kilmainham Gaol Museum, and further loans continue to museums in Ireland and abroad, recently including exhibitions on William Blake and on Giovanni Segantini. The rest of the collection sits in museum-standard offsite storage. Francis Bacon's Studio, by contrast, has not moved: the gallery says it remains fully protected in place on the Ground Floor throughout the closure, simply inaccessible to visitors until the building reopens.

Before its 2025 closure, the gallery was consistently described, by visitors and critics alike, as a quiet, uncrowded counterpart to Dublin's larger museums: free, centrally located, and anchored by two things nothing else in Ireland has, an outstanding share of the Lane Impressionist bequest and Francis Bacon's actual studio. The closure itself has been received as a genuine loss to the city's cultural life, even by writers who welcome the building work it is meant to enable.