Sir Hugh Lane, the original Irish Aesthete and the subject of my first book (published by Lilliput Press in 2000) drowned ninety eight years ago today after the RMS Lusitania on which he was returning from New York, was torpedoed by a German U-Boat off the coast of Cork. This portrait, now in the collection of the municipal art gallery in Dublin founded by Lane in 1908 was commissioned by his friends from John Singer Sargent two years earlier. One always wonders what Lane, still not yet forty at the time of his death, might have achieved had he lived longer.