The legend of Hugh Lane - the precocious and successful picture-dealer with an exceptional "eye" and of inordinate generosity - owes its origins to a 1921 biography of him by his aunt, Lady Gregory, and the fact that he died both prematurely (at the age of 39) and tragically (he was drowned on the Lusitania) and that his will was contested (on the flimsy basis of an unwitnessed codicil). His name is perpetuated by the (still unresolved) saga of "The Lane Pictures" and in the title of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, which since the centenary of his birth in 1975, has been called after him as a tribute to the role he played in its foundation. I always understood, by the way, that Lane specifically did not want his name attached to the gallery but Robert O'Byrne, in this excellent biography, does not refer to this.
Lane first proposed the idea of a gallery of modern art for Ireland in 1904 and, almost immediately, Dublin Corporation indicated its interest in the project. Next came Lane's offer as a gift, conditional upon a gallery being provided, of a group of pictures to form the nucleus of a collection; but it was this condition which proved to be the rock upon which the successful fulfilment of his proposal foundered. Although Lane handed over a substantial number of paintings to the gallery when it opened in temporary premises in 1908, 39 paintings "of Continental origin" - "The Lane Pictures" - remained his property and, in frustration with Dublin over the failure to provide a suitable gallery, he bequeathed these to the National Gallery, London. But before departing on his fatal trip to New York, he executed the unwitnessed codicil to his will leaving them to Dublin. The codicil was construed as not legally binding and, while it was agreed that Dublin had a moral right to the collection (in which neither it nor London had expressed any great interest in Lane's lifetime), the legal right of London was upheld, and the pictures remain the property of the London gallery.
Only nine of these pictures are today considered pre-eminent but, in spite of that, "The Lane Pictures" are all that most people know about Hugh Lane. His legacy to the National Gallery of Ireland, however, far exceeded in generosity and importance anything he did towards a gallery of modern art: as director for no more than the 14 months leading up to his death, he presented a total of 24 pictures of the first rank to the collection, and bequeathed the bulk of his considerable estate so that a purchasing fund for pictures might be established. By this means the gallery's collection has over the years been immeasurably enhanced.
It is to Robert O'Byrne's credit that he discovered that the National Library had a great deal of Lane material that had not previously been consulted - and it is this very substantial archive that he has mined so successfully in painting a fuller picture than had hitherto been possible of Lane and his achievements. While some of this correspondence and documentation had been in the library since the 1960s, most of it was acquired in the mid-1980s (as a gift from a Lane cousin), and in 1996, when it was purchased from that cousin's son. Faced with such a wealth of material, however, it is only a talented biographer who will know how to sift the most telling details and marshall the facts into a succinct account of his subject - and this O'Byrne has achieved most admirably. His text races along, scattering well-researched background information in its wake, and the result is a concise and informed account which brings to the foreground a figure whom O'Byrne himself describes as peripheral to the Irish cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And what do we learn? While inordinately generous in some respects Lane was terribly mean, mainly to himself, in matters of food, travel, and other day-to-day doings. (He was, after all, the son of a Protestant clergyman). He was also a compulsive gambler, thinking nothing of throwing away thousands on the tables of Monte Carlo. His famed "eye" for a good picture was not always as infallible as his aunt, Lady Gregory, and others would have us believe and - nor was his mind as open to developments in contemporary art (such as the Expressionists) as his championship of modern art would lead one to expect.
He was fastidious and on occasion querulous and tactless, and he suffered from not having had a proper education: he was unable either to write about art or, indeed, to make a speech about it; and he knew nothing of research. Influenced by Lady Gregory, he came to love Ireland and felt "he must be doing something for it", but later came to "hate the place and the people". He had a gift for friendship but also an aptitude for falling out with friends. Although so very sensitive in most respects, Lane was an ascetic when it came to the emotions: as O'Byrne points out, "he wrote an enormous number of letters but in all his extended correspondence there is no reference to personal feelings; and of his private life, he made no mention". That is most probably because he had none - or none that O'Byrne has been able to discover. But that is the only disappointment in a very well told story.