Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Of Modern Art

This little gallery, which celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2008, has a strong collection of Impressionist works led by Degas's Sur la Plage and Manet's La Musique aux Tuileries, and also holds sculptures by Rodin, a marvelous collection of Harry Clarke stained glass, and numerous works by modern Irish artists. One room holds the maddeningly cluttered studio of the Irish painter Francis Bacon, which the gallery purchased from London and moved to Dublin piece by piece, where it was reconstructed behind glass. Everything was moved, right down to the dust. It's an excellent, compact art museum, and a great place to spend an afternoon. The Tortured Tale of the Hugh Lane Gallery -- Hugh Lane was a millionaire and exuberant collector of art. In the early 20th century, he opened his own gallery in Dublin on Harcourt Street, but he soon tired of running it, and offered to donate the whole thing -- millions of pounds worth of Impressionist paintings -- to the city. His only condition was that the city should build an appropriate structure to hold it all. Dublin agreed, and all seemed well. However, months later, having failed to find a suitable structure, and caught up in wrangling over the cost, the city withdrew from the deal. Lane was furious and, in a temper, made an agreement with the National Gallery in London to give that vast art museum his collection instead. To the rescue came W. B. Yeats, who was so infuriated by the government's ineptitude that he wrote a series of angry poems lambasting it for its failure to find a place to house such magnificent works. Inspired in part by Yeats's fervor, Lane changed his mind, and decided to leave his collection to Dublin after all. He ordered his will changed, but had not yet had it signed and witnessed when he was killed in 1915 aboard the ocean liner Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. So began a legal stalemate in which the National Gallery and the city of Dublin struggled for the ownerships of the Monets, Courbets, and Manets that a few months earlier Dublin wasn't even sure it wanted. To an extent, the issue is still unresolved 90 years later, but luckily an agreement is in place by which the main works in the collection are displayed at different times by both galleries. The Hugh Lane Gallery now has a gorgeous home in the classical Charlemont House on Parnell Square. Mr. Lane would surely approve.

Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Of Modern Art is located in Parnell Square North, Dublin, 1. To communicate or ask something with the place, the Phone number is +353 1 222 5550. You can get more information from their website: http://www.hughlane.ie/. The coordinates that you can use in navigation applications to get to find "Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery Of Modern Art" quickly are 53.354000091553,-6.2645401954651