Art world negotiates deal for priceless ‘Old Masters’
NEGOTIATIONS are underway between Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery and the National Gallery in London regarding millions of euro worth of art.
The pending deal is at an “advanced stage” and is being hammered out among a handful of art executives and Government officials in the background of Brexit.
It is expected the deal will renew an agreement from 1993, that settled the question of which institution owned a number of masterpieces left behind by collector Sir Hugh Lane after his death in 1915. When contacted by the
Sunday Independent this weekend, a spokesperson for the Hugh Lane Gallery issued a statement which said: “Negotiations are ongoing. We hope to have news soon.”
Hinting at the outcome, the spokesperson later added: “It will be even more positive than the last agreement.”
At the heart of the negotiations is a trove of paintings by Renoir, Manet, and Pissarro. The works were initially bequeathed to London by Sir Hugh Lane, the late director of the National Gallery of Ireland, before his doomed voyage to New York aboard the Lusitania in 1915. The boat was hit 11 miles into its journey by a German torpedo and sunk off the coast of Ireland.
But shortly before his death, Sir Hugh had dramatically changed his mind about his last wishes.
He made a modification to his will, which stated that the paintings should remain in Dublin, on condition the city build a special gallery to house them, which it later did — The Hugh Lane Gallery on Dublin’s Parnell Square. However, because the modification to the will was not witnessed, the paintings legally belong to London — despite years of lobbying by Irish interests.
The works have been regarded by many, including the poet WB Yeats, as a symbol of British colonial plunder.
In 2015, the London gallery even expressed sympathy with Ireland’s plight, when Nicholas Penny, the then director, publicly acknowledged Dublin’s moral claim to the pictures.
“The National Gallery claims legal ownership of the paintings bequeathed by Sir Hugh Lane, but has long conceded that Dublin has some moral claim to them,” he said.
“There are so many cultural institutions which should, even if they don’t, acknowledge that some other institution or some other country, has some sort of moral claim on the works of art in their possession.”
Roy Foster, professor of Irish History at Oxford University, also called for ownership of the paintings to be transferred to Dublin as a way of righting a “long-standing historical injustice”.
Over the years the works have become a rallying point for Irish nationalist politics.
A compromise was eventually reached in
1993 — but to this day the National Gallery, London still remains the legal owner.
As part of the temporary deal, 31 of Lane’s paintings were sent on long-term loan to the Hugh Lane Gallery, while the jewels in the collection — including Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens — have gone back and forth between Dublin and London every six years.
That formal agreement expired in the past two weeks and the world-famous masterpiece Les Parapluies, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which gives a sensual appreciation of a rainy day in a city, was sent back to London in the last two weeks without much fanfare.
Also among the paintings which returned to London in the past fortnight are Manet’s Portrait of
Eva Gonzales, as well as paintings by Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro.
It is understood that Manet’s painting, along with three masterpieces by Degas, Monet, and Vuillard, are due to return to Dublin this month, which would give a clear indication that an extension of the agreement is being drawn up.
In 2013, Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane, described the arrival of Renoir’s The Umbrellas, and the brief reunion of all of Hugh Lane’s paintings in Dublin, as “an exciting homecoming” which she said “are part of the cultural history of modern Ireland”.
This weekend also happens to mark the late Hugh Lane’s birthday.