The story
Hugh Lane was an Irish dealer who wanted Dublin to have a gallery of modern art, and he gathered French Impressionist pictures to seed it. In 1915 he drowned when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, and he left a will muddled enough that Dublin and London have argued over his French paintings ever since, today sharing them in rotation.
The gallery he inspired, in a fine Georgian townhouse on Parnell Square, holds those Impressionist works, including a Manet and a Renoir, alongside Irish art. Its strangest room is the most recent addition.
When the painter Francis Bacon died in 1992, his chaotic London studio was given to Dublin, his birthplace, and moved here whole. A team logged some 7,000 objects, mapped where each one lay, and reconstructed the room behind glass, down to the paint-smeared walls and the drifts of slashed canvas and photographs on the floor, just as he left it.
