Hot Day

France's 19th century Impressionist Painter Berthe Morisot (sister-in-law of Edouard Manet) had little or nothing to do with Ireland's ages-long fight for freedom. She was merely one of many painters whose works were fancied by the wealthy Dublin connoisseur and art dealer, Sir Hugh Lane. But Ireland's grievances against Great Britain are many, and not the least of them concern the French impressionist pictures that once belonged to Sir Hugh.

They number 39 in all, including Renoir's famed, gentle Les Parapluies, and the small (17 1/2 in. by 29 in.), amiable boating scene Jour d'Ete (Summer Day) by Berthe Morisot. A will drawn in 1913 by Sir Hugh, then director of Ireland's National Gallery, left the pictures to England. But before he went to his death aboard the torpedoed Lusitania off Cork in 1915, Sir Hugh added a codicil to his will giving the pictures to Ireland, provided that it built a suitable gallery for them within five years. The codicil was not witnessed, so it had no legal validity. But from the moment of Sir Hugh's death, the Irish began pressing their claim to the Lane pictures. In Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art there is an empty room lined with photographs of the collection, waiting their "return." It has been a long wait.

First News. One day last week Sir John Rothenstein, director of London's government-owned Tate Gallery, got a telephone call from an Irish reporter who was checking an anonymous tip. Had Sir John heard that a picture was missing from the Tate's walls? "When?" he asked.

"Today," he was told. It was news to Sir John, but all too true. While an attendant was off on his midmorning tea break, someone had stolen Morisot's painting from the wall, frame and all.

Next day, when the news broke, all Ireland chuckled, and the usually sober-sided Irish Times ran a happy cartoon showing a trench-coated figure carrying a parcel with words, "It's the Jour d'Ete, and it's hot." An outfit called the Irish National Students Council boasted that two of its members had taken the picture. The night before, two young Irishmen got up on the roof of the Tate Gallery, but police had spotted them and set dogs on them. So next day the young vandals simply walked in, took down the picture wrapped it up and walked out. "We shall present it to the Municipal Gallery soon," they added.

Second Thoughts. The curator of the Dublin gallery was delighted. "It looks as though we'll get our pictures one by one, doesn't it?" he said. By the following day, however, the first fine careless rapture subsided. A member of the Dublin City Council announced that it "would certainly not accept a picture obtained in such a manner." "We have an irrefutable moral claim to the picture," said an Irish government spokesman, "but it is scarcely necessary to say that the government thoroughly disapproves of the [students'] action."

All that was necessary now was to find the guilty students and the hot Day. "We are treating this," said a Scotland Yard spokesman testily, "as a larceny."

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