Golf and fine art in Edinburgh.

Golf has been played in Scotland since at least the 15th century. Whilst its origins are obscure, it is undoubtedly close to the Netherlandish game of colf, which was played over rough ground or on frozen waterways, and involved hitting a ball to a target stick fixed in the ground or the ice. Colvers playing on the frozen canals appeared often in Dutch 17th century paintings.

Winter landscape, with skaters playing colf,
by Hendrick Avercamp c1620

There are many works by Hendrik Avercamp, for example, displaying a pale grey winter sky, a range of people socialising and participating in ice skating or colf. In the foreground, the viewer could easily see who was playing colf via the sticks they used. Avercamp may have been the first Dutch artist to use watercolours and gouache drawings in formal paintings and perhaps the first to make colf an important sport for artists to focus on. Note, for example, the delicate gouache colouring that created a sense of shadows on the ice.

In Scotland the game was often played over links courses, originally rough common ground where the land met the sea. The majority of Scotland’s famous old courses, such as St Andrews or North Berwick, were links courses.

At the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, an exhibition called The Art of Golf tells the story of the birth and evolution of Scotland’s national sport by bringing together fine art, golfing equipment and museum pieces significant to the game’s history. I am not sure if golf is the national sport, but I know the timing of the exhibition has been excellent. Its dates overlapped with two important events: the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow (July-August 2014) and the Ryder Cup in Gleneagles (Sep 2014), the biennial competition played between teams of professional golfers representing the USA and Europe.

Sir John Lavery,
Golfing at North Berwick c1920,
private collection
Photo credit: Scottish National Gallery

The exhibition starts in the early 17th century, as you would expect, with paintings of Dutch colf players. It then chart the origins of modern Golf in Scotland, including images of important early links courses in, for example, Leith. There are 60 paintings on display.

Moving into the C20th, The Art of Golf showcases a beautiful oil painting of the course at North Berwick, a coastal resort 40 ks east of Edinburgh. It was done by John Lavery, one of the Glasgow Boys. The exhibition also displays rare original golf-themed railway posters and takes the story of golf right up to the present day with aerial artworks of Scotland’s most famous golf courses, including Gleneagles.

The Edinburgh Reporter believed the centre piece of this exhibition is the greatest golfing painting in the world by Charles Lees (1800-80), The Golfers 1847. This work commemorated a match played on the Old Course at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St Andrews, by Sir David Baird and Sir Ralph Anstruther, against Major Hugh Lyon Playfair and John Campbell of Saddell. It represented a who’s who of Scottish golf at that time and was reproduced in a fine engraving and sold well. Lees made use of (early) photography to help him design the painting’s overall compos­ition. The painting is jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.

Charles Lees
The Golfers at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, 1847
Photo credit: Scottish National Gallery

If art and golf fans miss the exhibition, I recommend the gallery's illustrated colour catalogue, with essays by Michael Clarke and Kenneth McConkey, Professor of Art History at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle.

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I am assuming this is largely the same exhibition that went on show in Atlanta Georgia. Billed as the first substantial art survey on the subject organised by an American museum, The Art of Golf was on view in mid 2012 before touring four other American venues. The show featured 90 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture by artists as important as Rembrandt.

As in the Scottish exhibition, The Art of Golf in the USA tracked the game’s roots in the Netherlands and its development in Scotland, but then went on to give a specifically 20th century American feel to the history. Thus the artists included Scottish Enlightenment portraitist Sir Henry Raeburn and American artists James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol. A humour section included Charles Schulz's Peanuts and sly New Yorker cartoons about golf.