The Golfers - Golf's Greatest Artwork?

“The Golfers” by Charles Lees is perhaps the most iconic golf painting in the world. Our resident historian Dr Milton Wayne researches the remarkable story behind the image

Lee Wybranski, “Open 2012”The artist Charles Lees was born in 1800 in Cupar in Fife and studied under Sir Henry Raeburn in Edinburgh. He gained a strong reputation for portraiture as well as sporting paintings, but “The Golfers” is his undoubted masterpiece.

Upon completion, the painting was sold to Alexander Hill for £400, a large sum at the time. Then as now, given the relative expense of original oil paintings, prints made from the paintings were hugely popular, and as a publisher and printmaker, Alexander Hill may have commissioned Lees to create the work with this in mind.

Hill occupied a unique position at the confluence of the worlds of poetry, publishing, printmaking, portraiture and photography and through him we have the connections to all the elements which combined to make “The Golfers” so unique.

As a publisher, Hill had produced a very successful small book of poetry by George Fullerton Carnegie called Golfiana - or Niceties Connected with the Game of Golf. This featured verbal sketches of the eminent golfers of the day, and it is surely no coincidence that twenty of those characters were subsequently featured in the Lees painting.

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