The opening of the new extension to Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, is an event of great cultural significance for the city, and indeed the country. It is the most important development in the history of the gallery, which was founded in 1908.
In its present home, Charlemont House on Parnell Square, The Hugh Lane has had a special place in the hearts of generations of Dubliners. Its outstanding collection has proved to be a formative influence on many artists and writers.
The impressively integrated new wing, designed by architects Gilroy McMahon, makes the most of a restricted site and its sequence of spacious, handsome galleries effectively doubles the available exhibition area. Just as importantly, it incorporates an invaluable storage section where works from the collection not currently hanging are readily accessible.
Gallery director Barbara Dawson and her staff, together with city manager John Fitzgerald and the city council, deserve great credit for their combined commitment to a project of far-sighted ambition. Equally, the internationally renowned painter Sean Scully, in a remarkable gesture of solidarity with the city of his birth, has generously donated eight paintings to the gallery, while a ninth painting by him has been gifted by an anonymous donor.
In addition, for the first time since 1913, all of the Impressionist paintings that make up the Hugh Lane Bequest, shared with the National Gallery, London, are on view in Dublin until late in the year.
Francis Bacon's studio, reconstructed in the gallery, complete with an audio-visual presentation of Melvyn Bragg's interview with the painter, has proved to be one of the Hugh Lane's more contentious attractions. Now the exhibition of a number of unfinished paintings by Bacon, newly acquired, may also prove to be controversial. But controversy and debate are par for the course in cultural life.
By investing resources in The Hugh Lane, Dublin City Council has demonstrated its commitment to the Parnell Square regeneration plan and the ambition to establish the area as a cultural quarter. But most significant for the moment, perhaps, is the fact that Dublin now boasts a municipal gallery on a par with those of many of its European neighbours, one that is capable of drawing visitors from home and abroad.
It is a cause of sadness that Dermot Furlong, head attendant and mainstay of The Hugh Lane until his untimely death last year, did not live to see the transformation of the gallery he served so well.