• 26 September 2018
Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum by Morna O'Neill is now available to purchase here.
This book, funded for by the Paul Mellon Centre and published by Yale University Press charts a geography of the art market and the art museum in the early 20th century through the legacy of one influential dealer.
Born in Ireland, Hugh Lane (1875–1915) established himself in London in the 1890s. With little formal education or training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Titian, and Velázquez and described his life’s work as “selling pictures by old painters to buy pictures by living painters.” Lane assembled a collection of modern art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, amassed a collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings for Cape Town, and gave his own collection of modern art to the National Gallery in London.
Lane also donated paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland, where he was named director in 1914. Each chapter in this revelatory study focuses on an important city in Lane’s practice as a dealer to understand the interrelationship of event and place.
An interview with the author Morna O'Neill will be published in the next issue of PMC Notes, available from 1 October.