Details
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER. Typed letter signed ("W B Yeats") TO LADY AUGUSTA GREGORY, Dublin, 25 May 1924. 1 1/2 pages, 4to, double-spaced on two sheets, with autograph greeting and closing, with original stamped envelope addressed by Yeats.
THE "LANE BEQUEST"
Lady Gregory's nephew, Sir Hugh Lane, had originally intended to leave his celebrated collection of modern French paintings to the city of Dublin. Disagreement with the city authorities about the site for the gallery led him to change his will, leaving the paintings to the National Gallery in London. However, shortly before his death on the Lusitania in 1915, Lane relented and left them to Dublin in a codicil to his will which he signed, but which was unwitnessed. The codicil did not stand legally, and Yeats and Lady Gregory spent a considerable amount of effort in a long and fruitless attempt to have the paintings returned to Ireland. (The Lane paintings are how shared between the National Galleries of London and Dublin by an amicable arrangement of loans and exchanges.)
"I have sent the two dozen pamphlets [Sir Hugh Lane's French Pictures, which was designed to secure popular support] with the typed additions to the President. The night before last a Freeman's Journal reporter came to see me with a long document which Miss Harrison [who claimed to have been intimate with Lane] had sent them for publication. They did not like to publish without asking my advice, advice which I am glad to say they have taken...The thing was a pathetic piece of lunacy and very long...She stated of course that neither the codicil nor the will was genuine...She then goes to say that Hugh Lane was to have married her that summer [of 1915]...She does not say...who forged the will or the codicil...She has called twice to see me; once on the day I came back from Coole...I have no doubt that she is telepathetically receptive to anything that concerns the pictures. We must expect an active crisis of madness whenever...anybody takes up the question..." Published in Letters, ed. Wade.
THE "LANE BEQUEST"
Lady Gregory's nephew, Sir Hugh Lane, had originally intended to leave his celebrated collection of modern French paintings to the city of Dublin. Disagreement with the city authorities about the site for the gallery led him to change his will, leaving the paintings to the National Gallery in London. However, shortly before his death on the Lusitania in 1915, Lane relented and left them to Dublin in a codicil to his will which he signed, but which was unwitnessed. The codicil did not stand legally, and Yeats and Lady Gregory spent a considerable amount of effort in a long and fruitless attempt to have the paintings returned to Ireland. (The Lane paintings are how shared between the National Galleries of London and Dublin by an amicable arrangement of loans and exchanges.)
"I have sent the two dozen pamphlets [Sir Hugh Lane's French Pictures, which was designed to secure popular support] with the typed additions to the President. The night before last a Freeman's Journal reporter came to see me with a long document which Miss Harrison [who claimed to have been intimate with Lane] had sent them for publication. They did not like to publish without asking my advice, advice which I am glad to say they have taken...The thing was a pathetic piece of lunacy and very long...She stated of course that neither the codicil nor the will was genuine...She then goes to say that Hugh Lane was to have married her that summer [of 1915]...She does not say...who forged the will or the codicil...She has called twice to see me; once on the day I came back from Coole...I have no doubt that she is telepathetically receptive to anything that concerns the pictures. We must expect an active crisis of madness whenever...anybody takes up the question..." Published in Letters, ed. Wade.