34 FEATURE ARCHITECTURAL ARTWORK Written by Adam Lawrence Adam Lawrence profiles some of the best illustrators of golf courses in the game’s history – both full-time artists and architects who draw or paint. We can argue until we are blue in the face whether a golf course is a work of art. The Oxford English Dictionary defines art as ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination… producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’. In architecture, whether buildings or golf, there is obviously creative skill and imagination, but the works are appreciated primarily for their function – as an office, a home… or a golf course. So, the point is very definitely moot. What is not, at all, debatable is that, throughout the game’s history, golf courses have been a popular subject for artists. The earliest golf pictures were generally of golf matches – what is believed to be the first painting featuring golf, now titled, ‘View of St Andrews from the Old Course’, by an unknown artist, dates from about 1740 and now belongs to the Royal and Ancient. The most famous such image is ‘The Golfers’ by Charles Lees from 1847, depicting a match at St Andrews between Sir David Baird and Sir Ralph Anstruther against Major Hugh Lyon Playfair and John Campbell of Glen Saddel, which now belongs to the National Galleries of Scotland. The depiction of golf courses purely as subjects for landscape painting came later. To this day, the most famous are those painted by the prolific New Zealand-born, but English-resident illustrator Harry Rountree for Bernard Darwin’s book, The Golf Courses of the British Isles (1910). Now, Rountree’s style is highly evocative of its time, but his style initially developed in isolation from what was going on in the art world at the time. “Though I had done hundreds of drawings before I made the voyage of twelve thousand miles to London, I had never seen an original – except my own – and I was simply dying to see the little bits of Bristolboard containing the work of the men I most admired in the English illustrated magazines and papers,” he told the Boy’s Own Paper in a 1909 interview. The reproductions that the young Rountree saw in the papers that made the long journey to New Zealand must have helped develop his style, which, at least in his landscapes, has a soft, almost Impressionistic feel to it – which is perhaps not surprising for an artist who learned this way, rather than from studying contemporary painters – by then, the Impressionists were, in pure art terms, yesterday’s news. Architect Tripp Davis has an interesting take on Rountree’s work, suggesting it is not great golf art. “I love Rountree, but not for golf courses – for landscapes,” he says. “His work didn’t really show the substance of the golf all the time, but his painting of landscapes is amazing. “Defining substance as the details that impact the way a hole plays, Rountree was doing more Impressionistic brush strokes, which doesn’t lend itself to detail, and his perspective was often very broad to show the scale of the landscape. He did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the landscape and I would not want that to change, but the detail and scale doesn’t capture the substantive details. I don’t think it was meant to.” In his long and busy career, Rountree did not paint a lot more golf, though The art of golf
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