Denis Mahon

Awards Mahon was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1967, and knighted in 1986. He was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 2002 for his services to art, and received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Oxford, Rome and Bologna.

Legacy In the 1990s, Mahon lent his entire 57 piece art collection to various museums in the UK, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. The loans included: 25 to the National Gallery, London; 12 to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 8 to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; 6 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; 5 to the Birmingham Art Gallery; 1 to Temple Newsam House, Leeds.

In 2010, Mahon donated his entire library and archive to the National Gallery of Ireland.

After his death, the trustees of the charitable trust under instruction from Mahon's Will offered to donate the pieces to the national collection for free via the Art Fund, subject to the same conditions under which they were originally loaned. If these conditions were broken, then the art's owner the Art Fund could ask for their immediate return.