In 1937 the poet WB Yeats visited the Municipal Gallery in Dublin, and was moved to think back to the Irish literary revival around the turn of the century. “I sat down after a few minutes, overwhelmed with emotion. There were pictures painted by men, now dead, who were once my intimate friends. There were portraits of my fellow-workers … there, too, were portraits of our statesmen, the events of the last 20 years in fine pictures… Ireland seen because of the magnificent vitality of her painters, in the glory of her passions. For the moment I could think of nothing but that Ireland: that great pictured song.”

This powerful surge of feeling would inspire his poem “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”, in which he refers to Lady Augusta Gregory’s nephew Hugh Lane as the “onlie begetter” of the images that so moved him. Lane’s heritage was indeed in that Municipal Gallery in Parnell Square Dublin – and also in the National Gallery in Merrion Square, of which he was director, and to whom he gifted or bequeathed an astonishing number of works by El Greco, Goya, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Claude and many others. This munificence suggests a Medici or a Sainsbury pouring out gifts with the kind of aristocratic sprezzatura that appealed to Yeats. Lane, however, was not like that.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Claude Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow. Photograph: The National Gallery

He came from a marginal Irish Protestant-clerical background, with very little money and not much to make his way on – apart from his aunt Gregory’s connections. Lane’s mismatched parents separated when he was young, his schooling was sketchy, and he learned what he knew through immersion in the picture-dealing world from a very early age – working as an assistant to Martin Colnaghi, living in a succession of rented rooms in London. From late 1890s, breakthroughs but always something of a roller-coaster. The money came and went, which may account for Lane’s well-known frugality: like his aunt, he frequently dined on a bun and a piece of fruit. This continued even when he was knighted in 1909, and bought the lease of a lovely Chelsea house on Cheyne Walk, which he filled with treasures. By then he had become a famous dealer and a collector.

Lane is inevitably associated with the pictures he collected by Renoir, Manet, Degas, Monet, Daumier, Pissarro and Morisot, now shared between the National Gallery in London and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. But his original expertise was in old masters, and his discovery of impressionism came quite late, probably on his visit to Paris with his friend the painter William Orpen in 1904, where they descended on the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel. He borrowed some paintings from Durand-Ruel to show in Dublin, and later, Lane would buy from him Monet’s Lavacourt under Snow and two works by Manet: Music in the Tuileries Gardens and Eva Gonzalès.

Lane certainly felt that this was the kind of art that should be seen in Dublin. Though Welsh and Scots collectors has been buying Impressionists for some time, Irish taste had not caught up with them. And a certain current of conservatism, not to say Philistinism, persisted: not helped when Lane tried to get the avant-garde Irish novelist George Moore to join the cause of bringing French paintings to Dublin. Moore had been an early admirer of Impressionist painters, and therefore offered to give a lecture in Dublin in December 1904 about modern painting and the need for it to be exhibited in Dublin. But Moore was congenitally mischievous, contrarian and unreliable: he did as much damage as he could, by identifying the new French painting with moral licentiousness, which he airily said was what Dublin really needed. Artistic codes and conventions existed to be broken, he said, and the point of art was liberation. Dublin needed cafes and a demi-monde rather than a new art gallery: and Ireland needed images of sensual beauty rather than gazing on “the meagre thighs of dying saints”. He rounded it off by deriving the Christian doctrine of self-denial as a “deadly doctrine” derived from “some Bedouin tribe in the desert”, which the French had wisely renounced.

The painting which Moore took as his leitmotif was the magnificently earthy portrait of the painter Eva Gonzales by Manet. The last thing Lane needed, however, was for the kind of painting he wanted to bring to Ireland to be identified with an onslaught on dogmatic Catholicism- which is the message that easily shockable people took away from Moore’s lecture. This flagged up a warning that his campaign to bring modern European art to Ireland, beginning in 1904, was never going to be easy. Lane had not previously shown much interest in his Irish origins, and it was only exposure to Gregory’s circle – who didn’t at first take to him – at the family estate, Coole Park, that directed his thinking towards Ireland as an appropriate area for cultural entrepreneurship. But Lane now entered the world of Dublin movers and shakers and quite soon he began advancing the idea of a Gallery of Modern Art. This coincided with the exposure of impressionist painters to a wider British audience, following Durand-Ruel’s Grafton Gallery show in London in 1905. Lane wanted to bring the message to Dublin.

The significance of the temporary gallery he set up in Harcourt Street in January 1908 was potentially immense, as was the art he put into it. It was a year of artistic and cultural ferment, and high political hopes. The year before had seen the opening at the Abbey theatre of Synge’s controversial play The Playboy of the Western World, with attendant riots; James Larkin had begun organising Dublin dock workers, forming the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union which would convulse Dublin with labour unrest; and the Fenian revolutionary Tom Clarke had returned from the US. In 1916, he would be one of the chief planners and leaders of the Easter Rising. The radical collection of pressure groups that made up the Sinn Fein movement were also coalescing into something like a political party. 1907-8 also saw the passing of the Irish Universities Act setting up the National University of Ireland, the foundation of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, and the founding of Patrick Pearse’s school St Enda’s. which would be a sort of madrasa of revolution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Umbrellas (1881-6) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The National Gallery, London

One of the major issues in urban politics was how to improve living conditions in the inner city, where people were living in slums. So when Lane and various well-connected people agitated for money to purchase modern paintings and a building to put them in, there was a predictable groundswell against them: modern art was described as a luxury in a city that needed root-and-branch social reform. And thanks to George Moore, a flavour of libertinism and license also attached to the new painting (as was often mentioned disapprovingly in relation to Renoir’s buxom girls in the arms of burly workmen).

In the middle of it all, Lane tacked and veered, and took offence, and flounced between Dublin and London. Yeats’s pugnacious public poems did little to help. When, in 1913, Lane’s preferred plans, a gallery designed by Lutyens on two sides of the Liffey bank, connected by a bridge, were turned down, and after debates in the Corporation turned nasty, he offered 39 modern paintings to the National Gallery in London. The London Gallery accepted them, though on the understanding that they wouldn’t immediately exhibit them. The diversion of the paintings to London wasn’t easy and the gallery’s reaction was fairly sniffy – they eventually let it be known that they didn’t think many of them – including Monet’s Lavacourt and Renoir’s Les Parapluies – worth hanging. This was one reason why, two years later, Lane changed his mind again and added a codicil to his will leaving the 39 paintings to Dublin, on condition a suitable gallery would be built to contain them along with other modern paintings.

The other vital change was that, in 1915, Lane had at last become director of the National Gallery in Dublin, and had set about endowing it with gifts and was planning for its future. This, too, sparked controversy, as he was still a big-time dealer, and still operating on a knife-edge of debt owing to the art market’s collapse with the advent of war. He bought back pictures that he had sold to clients who were now in financial difficulties – notably Holbein’s great portrait of Thomas Cromwell (now so familiar to us thanks to Hilary Mantel), and Titian’s Man in a Red Cap. In fact, Lane was on the edge of having his own debts called in (he owed £30,000 – and that was before spending a similar sum on paintings at this time). But in a great coup, he sold both these star paintings to the American multimillionaire Henry Clay Frick. The deal necessitated his trip to New York in early 1915, and led to his fatal return voyage on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat.

This was, of course, the beginning of another story: the saga of the 39 paintings. Their value was by now estimated at £60,000: this would escalate sharply as impressionist values – already high when Lane began buying – soared into the stratosphere. The codicil to Lane’s will was perfectly clear about his wish to leave them to Dublin; but it was unwitnessed (though carefully initialed by Lane on every page) and the London gallery stamped on the letter of the law, all the more firmly after they (rather belatedly) exhibited the paintings in 1917. A long wrangle began that still remains unresolved.

Again one must remember the times in which these events took place. Already in 1915, Ireland had narrowly avoided civil war over Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule; the outbreak of World War had acted as a kind of lightning-rod, directing militant energy elsewhere, but the country remained an armed camp. Less than a year after Lane’s drowning, Dublin erupted in flames in the Easter Rising. (Had the bridge gallery been given the go-ahead back in 1913, it and its contents would have been blown to smithereens by the gunboat Helga which came up the Liffey and bombarded the rebel strongholds.) In 1918, Sinn Fein would sweep the board in the general election and begin their policy of setting up an alternative parliament in Ireland, Dail Eireann- backed up by the Army of the Irish Republic (or IRA). From early 1919, the country was convulsed by guerilla war. The conditions of Ireland, and the bitterness of Anglo-Irish relations, from 1916 to 1922, provide the backdrop to the campaign mounted by the Friends of the National Collections in Ireland to get the pictures back.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hugh Percy Lane in 1909.

The campaign to return the pictures to Dublin bridged the chasms opening up in Irish life- between Ulster and nationalist Ireland, between labour and capital, between Ascendancy and demos. A parliamentary commission to look into the disagreement over the disputed pictures unequivocally stated that Lane’s intention had been to leave them to Ireland, but speculated that, had he lived to see the extension to the Tate Gallery paid for by Lord Duveen, where the paintings were to be hung, he would have changed his mind. It included a “rider” argument that the expense of the new building, and Duveen’s understanding that the Lane paintings were to grace it, put a moral onus on the National Gallery to keep them. (This occasioned Yeats’s famous quip, that it was as if Ali Baba’s 40 thieves claimed that they had a right to the stolen treasure because they had gone to the expense of digging a cavern to hide it.) Other more relevant arguments, such as the fact that soldiers who died in action didn’t have to have their wills witnessed, or that Scottish law didn’t require a witness-signature to a codicil, were ignored; and people who had been favourable to Lane’s endeavours for Dublin, now changed sides and supported London’s claims. All Irish opinion united in seeing the attitudes of the London gallery, and the British government, as indefensible and unethical. But they remained unmoved.

Over the years, various attempts have been made to share the pictures. In 1959 a welcome advance was made, by the initiation of an amicable sharing arrangement, brokered by the future Lord Longford, Lord Moyne and Sir Denis Mahon, to make them available to “the people of Ireland”. Further revisions eventually left 31 of the paintings more or less permanently in Dublin – those paintings that had not stood the test of time – while the eight master works (all now of huge monetary value) were divided into two sets of four and swapped back and forth across the Irish Sea.

Last month I went, like Yeats, to a gallery to look at pictures. It was the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, to see the exhibition Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market – a fascinating profile of the man who had so much to do with presenting impressionism to the world. The climactic room brings together several of the works exhibited by Durand-Ruel at the Grafton Galleries in 1905: the show that highlighted how behind-hand English collections were in acquiring Impressionist paintings that now looked like undisputed masterpieces. including Monet’s Lavacourt Under Snow, Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens, and dominating the room – as she always does – Eva Gonzalès. In the exhibition, the legend beside each painting – the Monet of Lavacourt and the two great Manets – carries, as its location and owner, “National Gallery, London”. The Monet has the additional catalogue information that the French Impressionist Fund planned to present this painting to the Gallery in 1905, but was told it would not be acceptable: “By a twist of fate,” the catalogue adds, “the Monet entered the gallery collection in 1917 as part of the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest.”

A “twist of fate” is one way of putting it. But I can think of others. I don’t think it is unreasonable for me –or for anyone who has studied the history of the Lane paintings – to feel a glow of righteous rage when we see the ownership of these paintings vested solely and simply in the National Gallery, London. The arguments in favour of that vested ownership are no more convincing than they ever were. The paintings can, and should, be lent and shared (as many more great works of art should be) between the galleries of the two countries: appropriately so, at a time when relations between the two countries have never been better, when recent years have seen the astonishingly successful (and moving) first state visits of a British monarch to the Republic of Ireland, and an Irish president to the United Kingdom; and when, in the commemoration of the first world war, the British and Irish heads of state together inaugurated a memorial to the war dead of both nations.

Lane’s vision should be remembered, too, and his wishes, so clearly outlined at the time of his death 100 years ago this month. Surely, in commemorating this decade of anniversaries of the Irish revolution in which we are immersed, a symbolic act of restitution might be made, and ownership of all 39 Lane paintings vested in the gallery that bears his name (while still shared, for purposes of exhibition, between London and Dublin). They are part of that “great pictured song” by which Yeats envisioned Irish history. That song includes a litany of injustices now passed into history and past redressing – “things which we wish had been done differently, or not at all”, as Queen Elizabeth herself remarked after her visit to the Garden of Remembrance, dedicated to executed Irish revolutionaries, just across the road from the Hugh Lane Gallery. But by acknowledgement of the true ownership of the Lane pictures, however belatedly, a long-standing historical injustice might actually be righted, and thus, in time, forgotten. Which is surely the best way to commemorate history.