I put it off for years, and the building has now put me off for three more.
Hugh Lane opened this gallery on Harcourt Street in January 1908, and it is generally allowed to have been the first public gallery of modern art anywhere in the world — which is a sentence I have read a dozen times and still find faintly outrageous, since Dublin was not then a city with money to spare on being first at anything. In 1933 the collection moved into Charlemont House on Parnell Square, a townhouse Sir William Chambers designed for the first Earl of Charlemont and finished in 1763. A neoclassical private house on the north side of the river, given over to pictures the Earl would not have recognised. I like the arithmetic of that: a building older than the idea it now contains.
What has kept it at the top of my list, though, is a room that was carried in from somewhere else. In 1998 the gallery's director, Barbara Dawson, secured the gift of Francis Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington from his heir John Edwards and the executor Brian Clarke — and rather than photographing it and building a replica, they treated it as a dig. Archaeologists, conservators, art historians and curators recorded the position of everything, lifted more than seven thousand items, and took the doors, the floor, the walls and the ceiling with them. It was rebuilt in Dublin and opened to the public in 2001. Seven thousand items. Slashed canvases, torn photographs, brushes, the pages of books used as palettes, and the dust that the whole apparatus of modern museum practice was mobilised to keep in place. I have wanted to see that dust for a long time, and I have never once bought the ferry ticket.
So this entry is written twice over from the study, because the gallery closed to the public on 28 September 2025 for a refurbishment expected to run at least three years — the 1930s wing brought up to modern environmental and security standards, a new roof, new lighting, and a climate-controlled link through to the city library rising beside it on the square. The paintings — the Monet, the Degas, the Scully, the Harry Clarke glass — have been packed off to storage. The Bacon studio, which cannot sensibly be packed at all, stays where it is and is protected in place for the duration. There is an honest lesson in that, and it is mine rather than the gallery's: a thing you have always meant to do is not a thing you have done. Reopening is spoken of around 2028. I will be there in the first fortnight, and I intend to arrive with this page already written so that I can find out how much of it is wrong.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in, and at present nobody is standing in these.
The founder went down with the Lusitania, and the argument about his pictures outlived everyone who started it.
Hugh Lane drowned in May 1915 when the Lusitania was torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale. He was thirty-nine. His will had left his modern pictures to the National Gallery in London; a codicil written before he sailed left thirty-nine of them to Dublin instead, on condition a proper gallery was built. He signed it. Nobody witnessed it.
London declined to recognise it, and two cities spent the better part of a century negotiating over a piece of paper a witness would have settled in ten seconds. An agreement in 1959 sent half the pictures back and forth every five years; a further arrangement in 1993 left thirty-one of them in Dublin for good and set the remaining eight travelling in fours, on six-year loans. Renoir's Les Parapluies is among the travellers. It is the only masterpiece I know of that is also a custody arrangement.
I have not stood in front of any of it, and for the next few years neither will anyone else. That is not tragedy — the building will be better for the work, and the studio is being minded. But a gallery founded by a man who did not get to see his own gallery finished is a decent argument against postponement, and I have taken it personally.