The Mantelpiece

Hugh Lane, an Irish art dealer, owned this picture by 1908, when he lent it to the municipal gallery of modern art he had just founded in Dublin. He drowned in May 1915 when the Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish coast. His will left his modern paintings from the Continent to the National Gallery in London. A later codicil, never witnessed, gave them to Dublin, and the two cities argued over them for decades. Today they share them, and this one returned to London in 2026 after more than six years in Ireland. Vuillard painted it in 1905, in his own room at a house in Normandy that his friends Jos and Lucy Hessel rented for the summer. Wild flowers and bottles crowd the marble mantelpiece. On the back of the board is a quick sketch of a woman and two children on a beach.