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Through artistic representations, Court On Canvas guides us from the origins of the game as a genteel pastime for the upper classes, through its codification as a sport, to the international high-earning power game of today.
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COURT CANVASTENNIS IN ART
COURT ON CANVAS TENNIS IN ART
ON
This is the first publication to consider in depth the
representation of lawn tennis in art. Court on Canvas
contains a survey of images, illustrating the wide ranging
developments of the game from the 1870s to the present
day. The history of tennis in art is studded with contributions
from famous artists drawn to the game, including John
Lavery, L. S. Lowry, Christopher Wood, Eric Ravilious and
more recently David Hockney and Tom Phillips. This book
includes a wealth of these attractive images, as well as
many by lesser known yet highly accomplished artists of
the 1920s and 30s whose work deserves wider recognition,
including Percy Shakespeare and Marjorie Watherston.
Detailed examinations of the works are placed in a wider
social, historical and art historical context. The publication
comprises five essays: two by Ann Sumner (Director of the
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham)
covering a range of themes including the representation
of women in tennis; a chapter by Kenneth McConkey on
John Lavery and his many works inspired by tennis; Robert
Holland writes on the history of tennis in Birmingham, the
West Midlands and Wales, and Sue Elks provides a history
of tennis costume. Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art appeals to
tennis enthusiasts and art historians alike.
Ann
Sum
ner
Front cover: John Lavery, A Rally, 1885
Back cover: Lawrence Stephen Lowry,
The Tennis Player, 1927
Philip Wilson Publishers
The Timber Yard
109 Drysdale Street
London N1 6ND
Distributed throughout the world
(excluding North America) by
I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road
London W2 4BU
Distributed in North America by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of
St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10010
ISBN 978-0-85667-706-9
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COURT CANVASTENNIS IN ART
ON
Tennis in Art 3 text film.indd 3 30/03/2011 15:11
Tennis in Art 3 text film.indd 4 30/03/2011 15:11
Ann Sumner with
Kenneth McConkeySusan J. Elks Robert Holland
Philip Wilson Publishers
COURT CANVASTENNIS IN ART
ON
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© Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2011
First published in 2011 by
Philip Wilson Publishers
109 Drysdale Street
London N1 6ND
Distributed throughout the world
(excluding North America) by
I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road
London W2 4BU
Distributed in North America by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of
St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form by any means mechanical, electronic, photocopying or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Edited by Greg Smith
For PWP: Bruno Burton
Designed by Webb & Webb Design
Printed and bound in China by Everbest
Front cover: John Lavery, A Rally, 1885
Endpapers: Helen Wills, A Game of Tennis, 1927, crêpe de
Chine, Victoria and Albert Museum
Frontispiece: Christopher Wood, Tennis Players, c. 1925–6
Back cover: Lawrence Stephen Lowry, The Tennis Player, 1927
ISBN 978-0-85667-706-9
Accompanies an exhibition at The Barber Institute of Fine
Arts, University of Birmingham (27 May-18 September, 2011)
Exhibition Organising Committee:
Chezzy Brownen
Michael Cullen
Christopher Elks
Susan J. Elks
Honor Godfrey
Robert Holland
Kenneth McConkey
Neil Maybury
Greg Smith
Ann Sumner
Robert Wenley
In memory of my father Tim Sumner who died during
Wimbledon fortnight 1996 and Tessa Sidey, a colleague and
fellow tennis enthusiast who sadly did not live to see this
exhibition, dying on the 1st January 2011.
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter One From Pat-ball Tennis to the Fury of the Modern Game: The Changing Image of Lawn Tennis in BritainAnn Sumner
Chapter TwoEdgbaston’s Gem of a Game: The Origins of Lawn TennisRobert Holland
Chapter ThreeTennis Parties Kenneth McConkey
Chapter FourTennis and the Artist, 1870 – 2010Ann Sumner
Chapter FiveTennis Fashions in the FrameSusan J. Elks
Artists’ BiographiesKatie Robson
Bibliography
Photographic Credits
Index
Authors’ Biographies
8
11
35
47
83
125
140
155
158
161
167
Contents
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Chapter FourTennis and the Artist, 1870 – 2010Ann Sumner
Numerous artists painted tennis scenes, and several played the game themselves. Initially, many of the artists who depicted tennis came from well-off upper middle-class families where the game was part of their upbringing, and those that did not were attracted to tennis because of their patrons. Tennis was an outdoor sport which provided a variety of style, strokes and tactics that challenged painters who wanted to capture the movement of the game and reflect this modern pastime. It was played in well-kept gardens with active and fashionable young people participating, so artists tried to adapt their styles of painting – whether portraiture, landscape, genre or still life – to include it. The game enjoyed its greatest popularity in Britain in the 1920s and ‘30s and, not surprisingly, many of the most innovative and inspiring artistic responses date from this period.1 As we shall see, certain key themes associated with the sport are persistent throughout the history of tennis art.
‘A new and interesting game ... Full of healthy excitement’: early artistic responses to lawn tennis2
The first tennis paintings often reflect the novelty of female players participating in sport. Women had not previously been seen exercising on immaculately rolled lawns in the heat of the summer. The first tennis paintings date from the late 1870s and early 1880s and the artists cannot always be identified (fig. 4.1). Yet, Jemima Blackburn, the Scottish artist who painted the first dated watercolour of players in action, was well known for her drawings of birds and observations of life in the West Highlands. She recorded other sporting pastimes such as riding, curling, skating and swimming.3 Her work reflected her upper middle-class life, and it was in this context that she painted a charming watercolour of a tennis game (fig. 4.2).Detail from Edith Hayllar, A Summer Shower (fig. 4.6)
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Fig. 4.1 Anonymous (‘E R’), Girl with a Ball, Stafford Lodge,
1877, watercolour on paper, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
Although this work is dated 25 April 1877 and is of high
quality, as well as being signed with a monogram, the
name of the artist is still unknown. The watercolour shows
a young girl (under the age of sixteen because of her
shortened skirt) about to serve underarm. It is the earliest
known artistic image inspired by lawn tennis. There is
another unattributed drawing in the Wimbledon Lawn
Tennis Museum which shows a group of players in action.
Other early tennis pictures produced in Scotland include a watercolour of around 1879–80 by Alexander Carlyle Bell (1823–1900), The Tennis Party at the Pirn (private collection), showing his family home south of Edinburgh,4 and Lawn Tennis by landscape painter David Murray (1849–1933) exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts in 1880 (private collection). The best known paintings of tennis subjects are of course those by the ‘Glasgow Boys’ and most especially by John Lavery (see chapter three). Arthur Melville and James Guthrie gave Lavery encouragement while he was painting his The Tennis Party (fig. 3.1), in which he pioneered the elongated landscape format, enabling him better to suggest the length of the court. It is not known whether any of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ joined in the tennis at Cartbank, where the work was painted in the summer of 1885. Tennis rackets do appear in photographs of Lavery’s studio in the 1890s, but they look ornamental (fig. 3.13). Indeed, there is no firm evidence that Lavery actually played the game. His Tennis Party was widely exhibited however, and had a lasting influence on other artists who attempted the subject such as Charles March Gere and Robert Ponsonby Staples (figs. 3.22–23).
In the pretty Cotswold village of Broadway later that same summer, a number of American artists including Edwin Austin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, Francis Davis Millet and George Boughton were living in a bohemian artistic colony, avidly playing tennis.5 Tennis was extremely popular in America and they no doubt all learnt to play before coming to Britain.6 In September, Sargent began work on his most famous painting, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Britain). Each day at 4 pm, the friends would finish their painting and relax playing tennis in the garden of Farnham House. Just as light was fading,
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Fig. 4.2 Jemima Blackburn, Tennis Match at
Dalvey near Forres: Wedderburns v. Blackburns, 1878,
watercolour on paper, private collection
Blackburn’s only training was a few informal lessons
with Edwin Landseer, but her work was admired by
the critic John Ruskin, and her drawings of birds were
widely published. Blackburn often included herself in her
watercolours and here she visits the Dalvey estate – she is
probably the figure on the far right. The watercolour shows
a match played in 1878 between two families who knew
each other well. Jemima had been born a Wedderburn
and had known her husband, Hugh Blackburn, since
childhood – he may be one of the male spectators.
Sargent insisted on pausing the game and would bound across the lawn to where his easel had been set up to paint the two little girls with their lanterns amid the lilies. For ten minutes he would furiously paint away in a most athletic manner. Then he would stop, dash back to the court and ‘join us again, so long as the twilight permitted, in a last turn of lawn tennis’.7 Although Frank Millet sketched Sargent as he worked (fig. 4.3), none of these artists actually painted tennis subjects.
Meanwhile in the tranquil Berkshire countryside in the early 1880s, the Hayllar sisters, Edith and the younger Mary, painted genre and still life scenes in which tennis featured. The girls and their siblings
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were taught to paint by their father, the artist James Hayllar (1829–1920), at their home, Castle Priory, on the banks of the river Thames at Wallingford. Their paintings were inspired by the domestic bliss they enjoyed together and show the interiors and the leisurely pursuits in their garden. Mary Hayllar is best known for her still-life painting and she adapted her style to include tennis.8 The Tennis Party, 1880 (fig. 1.1), and The Lawn Tennis Season, 1881 (fig. 4.4, right) both show distant games of mixed doubles, accurately depicted through a window and a detailed foreground with still-life observations. A further work, Marking the Court, is now lost.9
The green lawns of the tennis court itself, empty of players, became a popular theme for artists. Another female painter, Olive Wheeler Smith (active 1878–83), whose work can be somewhat sentimental, produced one of her best paintings on such a theme in A Garden Border by a Tennis Court of 1883 (private collection). She emphasises the setting of the beautifully kept grass court – the luxuriant flowers and distant view with ominous rain clouds. The Victorian watercolourist Albert Goodwin, who was a favourite of the art critic John Ruskin, also painted a deserted tennis lawn at the family home of Charles Darwin, Down House, Kent in 1880 (fig. 4.5). The first Wimbledon runner-up William Cecil Marshall, who was at Cambridge with one of Darwin’s sons, played on this grass court. Darwin himself was not a player, but his son Frank wrote that ‘He much enjoyed wandering idly in the garden with my mother or some of his children. He used to like to watch us playing at Lawn Tennis and often knocked up a stray ball for us with the curved handle of his stick’.10 Goodwin presents us with the moment after the Darwin family has left the court, having returned to the house to take tea. The theme of empty tennis courts would continue into
Fig. 4.3 Francis Davis Millet, Mr Sargent at Work on
‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, c. 1885, ink on paper, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington
In the late summer of 1885, Sargent painted his most
famous work Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Britain) in
Broadway in the Cotswolds while staying with the colony
of American artists there. The large painting shows the
daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnard at dusk
in the garden of Farnham House. Sargent painted the
work outside in the twilight to capture the moment the
girls lit their lanterns. Each evening he would break off
from his game of tennis to work on the painting for a few
minutes and then return to the match. Millet captures
him furiously painting away in this little sketch.
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TENNIS AND THE ARTIST, 1870 – 2010
Fig. 4.4 Mary Hayllar, The Lawn Tennis Season, 1881,
oil on canvas, Southampton City Art Gallery
Hayllar lovingly depicts such tennis necessities as an
open parasol to protect fair female skin from the sun,
tennis rackets, tennis slippers and six white balls in
the dark-panelled interior of Castle Priory, her family
home. These items seem to have been discarded by the
players who have retired for a break indoors. Others
continue their game and are visible through the window.
After her marriage to Henry Wells, Mary ceased to paint
oils and restricted herself to miniatures of children.
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Fig. 4.5 Albert Goodwin, Down House, 1880, watercolour
on paper, Down House, English Heritage
There are no players in sight at the Kent home of Charles
Darwin’s family, just a discarded racket with a boater
nearby. Darwin himself did not play, but his children were
exceptionally keen. William Cecil Marshall, the runner-up
at the first ever Wimbledon final, and a family friend, noted
on a visit to Down House: ‘I was one day playing lawn
tennis with his sons in the front of his house when [Darwin]
looked out of an upper window and explained with obvious
distress, “This confounded Drosera has gone all wrong this
morning, upsetting my theories and spoiling a year’s work”’.
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TENNIS AND THE ARTIST, 1870 – 2010
the twentieth century with Harold Speed’s deserted grass court of 1925 and Stanley Spencer’s corner of the court at Cookham in 1938 (fig. 4.19).11
Love All: The Romance of TennisThe social aspects of lawn tennis account in part for its rapid growth in popularity in the 1880s and ‘90s. It provided the ideal opportunity for upper and middle class young couples to meet and many attachments began with a gentle game of mixed doubles at the lawn tennis club. Although the game was gradually transformed from the garden party environment to the public tournament, with vast crowds of spectators, it still maintained an air of romance. This is reflected within tennis paintings well into the twentieth century. The most famous example of blossoming young love is depicted in Edith Hayllar’s A Summer Shower, 1883 (fig. 4.6). In the comfort of a dry hallway, a young male player has the opportunity to pay attention to his female tennis partner. Her flushed cheeks suggest that her admirer’s conversation is having an impact, although the colour may reflect her recent exertions on court and the dash in from the rain. Hayllar adapts her style of genre painting to include this new sporting craze much associated with rain breaks and the uncertainties of British summers.12
There are no chaperones in William Hatherall’s pencil drawing titled Tennis Romance (fig. 4.7) in which a languid young lady rests in a wicker chair, tennis racket beside her, and with her head tilted as if in flirtatious conversation with a mysterious man. More typically, both John Lavery (figs. 3.10–11) and John Scott (fig. 4.8) depicted couples resting after play in the presence of somewhat awkward looking female chaperones. Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, reveals that as a child she was sometimes required to be a ‘chaperone to courting couples’. In her autobiography
Fig. 4.6 Edith Hayllar, A Summer Shower, 1883,
oil on panel, private collection
The panelled hall at Castle Priory appears in a number of
the Hayllar sisters’ paintings. The river Thames is seen
beyond with a woman holding an open umbrella indicating
rain and in the middle distance a male player in whites
pours lemonade. A racket rests against the panelled
archway with tennis balls scattered on the black and white
tiled floor, all meticulously depicted. In the foreground a
seated, wistful young lady with her racket resting upon
her pink tennis apron, is admired by her male partner.
Edith married the Revd. Bruce Mackay in 1900 and she
ceased painting, never mentioning her art in later life.
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Fig. 4.7 William Hatherall, Tennis Romance,
1880s, pencil on paper, private collection
William Hatherall was a successful illustrator who
occasionally exhibited historic pictures at the Royal
Academy. The young lady is shown full face as in
Hayllar’s Summer Shower, but her suitor, with cigarette
in hand, is shown mysteriously only from the back. There
are no chaperones in sight and this couple sitting in
their wicker chairs, common on the side of the tennis
lawn, have taken a break under the shade of a tree to
conduct their flirtation. The drawing may well be an
illustration, though the subject has not been identified.
she depicts herself charmingly in such a pose (titled Conscientious Chaperone), as a tiny girl on a stool, with a young man seated by his tennis racket and a lady in a hammock, with a large fan. Her mother, Maud de Puy, noted of the English: ‘the upper middle-class think they are acting rightly by over-protecting their daughters ... When Gwen grows up it will be very hard to know how to treat her. If I let her be as independent as a girl at home, people will say in Cambridge that she is fast’.13 Gradually such behaviour relaxed: Charles March Gere in his The Tennis Party of 1900 (fig. 3.22), illustrates a more informal gathering of young fashionable players who, just a few years later, were able to mix with greater freedom.
Paintings were limited in their capacity to capture all of the nuances of court romances. The tensions between love rivals at tennis parties and the pressure to play well, is rarely conveyed in artistic representations. In Gere’s accomplished work, painted at his affluent family home in Leamington Spa and depicting his sister and her future husband, the undercurrents of competitiveness and the desire to win both match and sweetheart are not apparent. The literature of the period better reflects the complex role tennis played in romantic attachments. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens (1906), the young writer Jeremy Garnet falls for a beautiful brunette, Phyliss Derek, while staying in Devon. With Phyliss looking on he is thrashed 6–0 by a dashing naval captain. ‘I felt a worm and no man. Phyliss, I thought, would probably judge my entire character from this exhibition. A man, she would reflect, who could be so feeble and miserable a failure at tennis, could not be good for much in any department of life’.14
A suitor’s ability to play good tennis is further emphasised in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, published in 1908. Tennis plays a key role in the
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Fig. 4.8 John Scott, After the Tennis Match, c. 1885,
oil on canvas, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
These beautifully dressed figures are shown in a leafy
bower protected from the sun. The couple seem awkward
in front of their chaperone, however, and there seems to
be little chemistry between them. The artist, John Scott,
originally came from Carlisle but he was living in London
by 1879. His working day started at nine and he painted
until lunchtime when he would generally indulge in one
of his favourite recreational sports – tennis, boating or
billiards. This is one of his most successful paintings.
breakup of the romance between Lucy Honeychurch and her fiancé Cecil Vyse. When Cecil refuses to play tennis with her younger brother Freddie, Lucy makes up the foursome. She is immediately struck by George Emerson’s competitive spirit and is irritated when her fiancé reads aloud from his book as they play. On calling off their engagement, Lucy is direct with Cecil: ‘If you want to know, quite a little thing decided me to speak to you – when you wouldn’t play tennis with Freddy’. Thus ended her unsuitable relationship with Cecil and her eyes were opened to the potential of George Emerson.15
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The young Scottish artist Duncan Grant was an accomplished tennis player and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a set of artists, writers, philosophers, novelists (including Forster) and intellectuals who met informally.16 Grant’s graceful tennis playing, combined with his complicated love-life, apparently inspired the first tennis ballet, Jeux (Games), performed by the Ballet Russes in 1913. The Russian dancer and choreographer Vasily Nijinsky watched Grant with Leon Bakst, the artist and stage painter for the Ballets Russes, who exclaimed ‘Quel décor!’ at the sight of the beautiful young man playing on court in Bedford Square.17 The plot of Jeux involved three young athletic people, dressed for tennis, who meet in a park at twilight. The male figure has lost a tennis ball, but when he discovers two young ladies he forgets about the ball and before long all three are kissing passionately. The poet Rupert Brooke thought of the ballet as a ‘Post-Impressionist picture put in motion’.18 There is a drawing associated with the ballet by Grant (fig. 4.9), though he was not responsible for the set designs. He also made two tennis-themed murals at 38, Brunswick Square, and much later produced a drawing of a nude man with a tennis racket (fig. 4.14).
Throughout tennis art there are numerous individual studies of young girls with rackets that have romantic, sensuous overtones, such as Frank Miles’ Pause in the Match of 1883 (Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum) or the mysterious Scottish Girl, attributed to Samuel Reid (fig. 4.10). This work shows a pretty young woman clutching her racket and standing wistfully beside prominent foxgloves. Another beautiful portrait of a single female is La Thangue’s poetic Resting after the Game, 1888 (fig. 3.16). This is a tender study of the artist’s wife, Kate, an actress, sitting on a wicker chair in dappled sunlight with her racket on her lap. A further wistful example is James Guthrie’s Tennis of 1890 (fig. 3.15).
Fig. 4.9 Duncan Grant, Tennis Player, 1913, pencil and
bodycolour on paper, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
The society hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell, recalled Grant
playing tennis so gracefully that he inspired Vaslav Nijinsky
(1890–1950), the Russian dancer and choreographer, to create
the first tennis ballet Jeux (Games). This was performed by the
Ballets Russes in 1913 with music by Claude Debussy. Although
Grant inspired the ballet, he did not paint the scenery and this
work may have been an early idea when he hoped he might
get more involved. Wearing vibrant colours – the player is not
sporting the traditional whites – he reaches for an overhead shot.
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The penchant for male artists to portray individual girls with rackets continued into the twentieth century with different sexual undercurrents. For instance, L. S. Lowry, who had a complicated relationship with women, produced a series of studies of young girls on the beach at Lytham St Annes, which had tennis courts nearby.19 One tiny oil shows a young teenage girl from behind, holding a tennis racket (fig. 4.11). These studies of girls have been described as his ‘Lolita’ pictures and they appear to repeat an idealised girl who does not grow to maturity. She was called Ann and sported a thick long black plait of hair. A more worldly tennis girl was painted by Dudley-born Percy Shakespeare, about ten years later (fig. 4.12). With her cropped dark hair, ample bust and direct gaze, she is shown with her legs crossed, revealing much of her thigh. A more complex but equally sensual image by Miguel Mackinlay of 1930 shows two young women relaxing under a rug together in a garden after a game of tennis (fig. 4.13). Mackinlay was working in a thriving artistic community in Bushey, Hertfordshire at this time. Here, the iris flower beds probably symbolise cherished friendship. In the same vein, the subject of Duncan Grant’s sketch of a nude male figure with a racket (fig. 4.14) from the 1950s is the young poet and teacher Paul Roche who became Grant’s close friend. Grant particularly enjoyed making nude studies of the much younger Roche. The reference to tennis is tenuous: the racket was a prop, a leftover from Grant’s younger days as a player.
Tennis was a particularly inspiring subject for the printmakers of the interwar years, including Gwen Raverat who is now best known for her distinctive wood engravings. This delightful image of 1937 (fig. 4.15) shows a young couple with rackets aloft, perhaps more akin to the author’s childish ‘pat-ball’ tennis. It beautifully illustrates the artist’s mastery of light and shade and bold sense of design, with
Fig. 4.10 Attributed to Samuel Reid, Scottish Girl, c. 1887,
oil on canvas, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
This work, much influenced by John Everett Millais,
may originally have been exhibited under the title The
Queen of Lawn Tennis in 1887. The girl has a certain
regal quality about her. She wears a typical straw hat
and a tennis apron with large pockets for tennis balls.
Holding her racket, she stands by prominent purple
foxgloves which can have both positive and negative
connotations: sometimes they can heal, sometimes they
are poisonous and they can therefore be seen as symbols
for the ups and downs of a romantic relationship.
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TENNIS AND THE ARTIST, 1870 – 2010
Fig. 4.11 Lawrence Stephen Lowry, The Tennis
Player, 1927, oil on board, private collection
Lowry’s series of studies of young girls on the beach at
Lytham St Annes includes one who holds a tennis racket.
The resort, a classic seaside town on the Fylde coast south
of Blackpool, was where the Lowry family enjoyed what
holidays they could afford in the 1920s. Tennis was by then
a mainstream sport and a popular holiday activity so that
girls walking by with tennis rackets would have been an
everyday sight. However, the girl here is highly idealised;
with her thick black plait she appears many times in Lowry’s
work over a long period and she was known as Ann.
Fig. 4.12 Percy Shakespeare, The Tennis Player, the 1930s,
oil on canvas, Dudley Museum and Art Gallery
Tennis was an important theme in Shakespeare’s work in
the 1930s when he also produced the larger canvas of a
game in progress (fig. 1.19). His interest in tennis may have
been aroused as a boy, as, although he came from a working
class area of Dudley, the family lived close to municipal
courts. In the 1930s Dorothy Round, who also came from
Dudley, won Wimbledon twice, and this must also have
encouraged his interest in the sport. It was once thought
that this was a portrait of Dorothy herself, but her features
were quite unlike those of the young lady shown here.
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TENNIS AND THE ARTIST, 1870 – 2010
Fig. 4.13 Miguel Mackinlay, Tête-à-Tête, 1930, oil
on canvas, Bushey Museum and Art Gallery
These two elegant young ladies relax in sensuous languid
poses after playing a match. One is still in her tennis clothes,
the other has changed into more elegant attire. They have
just enjoyed their tea, an informal affair compared with
the Victorian tea parties recorded by the Hayllars. As the
Saturday Evening Post noted in 1932: ‘The feminine mind
in sports reflects the general trend of feminine thinking
of the day. The ideas and ... the inhibitions imposed upon
us by previous generations are being dispelled’. The
rug may be keeping the ladies warm, or, as has been
suggested, it may also hint at a sexual relationship.
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the figures swinging out to right and left. Although Raverat produced some delightful tennis images, she was actually not a keen player, recalling in her autobiography that during her upbringing in Cambridge she was ‘not very good at sport’ and ‘was very bad indeed ... at tennis’.20 Nonetheless, Gwen still fondly recollected her visits to Down House (fig. 4.5), to visit her grandmother, noting that ‘the place of all others, where the essence of the whole house was concentrated, was in the cupboard under the stairs, by the garden door. It was full of ancient tennis rackets, smaller than those we use now ... and it was there that the exquisite, special smell of the house was strongest’.21
Whilst in Britain tennis was not always associated with the most athletic of men, in America it had a different reputation. The macho and athletic American artist George Bellows, a semi-professional baseball player, wooed his wife Emma over games of tennis in New York and later portrayed them playing together in the early days of their marriage.22 His atmospheric The Tournament (Tennis at Newport) c. 1921 (fig. 4.16) has a romantic element. In the foreground a young man in black tie is more interested in paying his respects to a woman, though she turns away and watches the tennis instead of responding to him.
In Britain it was Marjorie Watherston who poignantly captured the atmosphere of a crowded Wimbledon Centre Court in her 1923 Ladies’ Wimbledon Singles Final (fig. 1.5), whilst actually producing a romantic image. The scene is dominated in the foreground by a striking couple. A suave sophisticated male figure and a chic woman in a fashionable hat have eyes only for each other, rather than the exciting match taking place below. The Irish portrait painter William Orpen also enjoyed tennis. Coming from a solidly middle-
Fig. 4.14 Duncan Grant, Nude Tennis Player, the
1950s, charcoal, pen and coloured pencil on
paper, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
This work is part of a series of studies of male nudes (none
of the others have tennis rackets) and appears to show the
poet Paul Roche, twenty years Grant’s junior, whom he met
in 1946. By the time this drawing was made Grant’s playing
days were probably over and the racket simply acted as a
prop rather than being evidence of nude tennis (fig. 4.31).
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Fig. 4.15 Gwendolen Mary Raverat, Tennis, 1937, wood
engraving, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
Gwen Raverat was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin
and daughter of a Cambridge University professor. She
was raised playing tennis on the court her father had laid
out at their home, Newman Grange, though she was no
star player. Gwen’s sister Margaret recalls that ‘a punt was
frequently needed to rescue balls hit into the river from the
lawn above’. This distinctive wood engraving has a lightness
of touch typical of Raverat’s work and, although dated
1937, it harks back to the innocent ‘pat-ball’ of her youth.
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Fig. 4.16 George Bellows, The Tournament (Tennis at
Newport), c. 1920, oil on canvas, private collection
In the summer of 1919 Bellows and his family stayed at
Middletown, Rhode Island and travelled to see world class
tennis at the nearby Casino Country Club in the famous
Newport invitation tournament. A keen tennis player, Bellows
watched his favourite players such as Bill Tilden (1893–1953)
and sketched avidly, capturing the lavish social life around the
courts too. Back in his New York studio he produced a number
of large oils based on his sketches including this richly coloured
example. The player approaching the net is thought to be Tilden.
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class Irish family, he played at the famous Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club in Dublin, when young.23 He often illustrated his letters and one example shows a sketch of himself and his wife Grace playing tennis together on holiday in around 1910.24 And in another letter, to his wife dating from 1907, he depicts a tennis tournament.25 Orpen’s most famous tennis image, however, is this captivating portrait from 1923 of John McCormack wearing his tennis kit (fig. 4.17). The popular Irish tenor was a romantic figure whose magnificent voice made him a fortune. In this portrait he looks relaxed with his costume crumpled, having just come in from the tennis lawn and nonchalantly picking up a sheet of music. Although this appears a romantic image of the ‘Pavarotti of the era’,26 McCormack’s wife records that he and Orpen talked politics throughout the sittings.27
The atmosphere is very different in Richard Carline’s tense Gilbert and Janet Pairing up for Tennis (fig. 4.18), painted in 1922. Gilbert Spencer, artist brother of Stanley, stands against a gate pillar with the Carlines’ maid Janet Piggott in a mustard-coloured dress. The female wearing a visor and red socks, seen from the back, is unidentified – Gilbert stares at her directly with flushed cheeks. Carline’s picture is set at 47, Devonshire Hill, his family home, where the Hampstead Circle of artists gathered. Stanley Spencer was amongst the group and he actually moved into the house in 1925, later marrying Hilda Carline. Their marriage gradually became unhappy and they quarrelled over many issues, including tennis. When they moved to Chapel View, Burghclere in 1930, Stanley purchased a tennis net, hoping that they could live a more conventional life and play together. However, Hilda was not convinced by the plan and in the end trees were planted on the spot designated for the court and the net was used to protect strawberries from the birds.28 Spencer did illustrate part of a court
Fig. 4.17 William Orpen, John McCormack, 1923, oil
on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
The popular Irish tenor was painted by Orpen, himself
a tennis player, in 1923. Orpen considered a number of
costumes including evening dress and a dressing gown.
One day he saw McCormack come in from a game of
tennis, pick up a piece of music and go straight to the
piano. Orpen decided that this was how McCormack should
be portrayed, in tennis whites with a piece of music in
his hand. The link between tennis and music had been
established in 1914 when Eric Satie included a piano piece
called Le Tennis in his Les Sports et Divertissements.
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Fig. 4.18 (left) Richard Carline, Gilbert and Janet Pairing up
for Tennis, 1922, tempera on canvas, private collection
Richard Carline is probably best known as the brother-in-law
of Stanley Spencer, who married his elder sister Hilda, and
for his war art. He was a member of the Hampstead Circle of
artists which included Robert Bevan, Mark Gertler, Paul and
John Nash, as well as Stanley and Gilbert Spencer. The latter
is shown here, racket in hand. This work not only shows how
the group spent their leisure time, but it also reflects social
changes: the Carlines’ maid, Janet Piggott, is the central figure.
Fig. 4.19 Stanley Spencer, View from the Tennis Court,
Cookham, oil on canvas, 1938, private collection
Spencer moved back to his home village of Cookham on the
river Thames in 1932 with his wife Hilda and two daughters.
Although Hilda remained the love of his life, they were divorced
in 1937. He remarried just four days later, but that relationship
quickly foundered. In this wistful work he follows a tradition
of depicting unpopulated courts, though in this case its
emptiness may be a symbolic reference to his failed marriages.
As with many of Spencer’s interwar landscapes, he shows the
foreground in detail with a sharp plunge into the distance. It also
beautifully illustrates his idealisation of the English countryside.
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in View from the Tennis Court, Cookham (fig. 4.19) in 1938 (perhaps the lack of players reflects his wife’s uninterest in the game) and he later sketched a group of portly male tennis players (private collection).
Tennis remained important to the middle classes and continued to be associated with romance, as John Betjeman’s famous poem, A Subaltern’s Love Song (1941), illustrates:
What strenuous singles we played after tea,We in the tournament – you against me!Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! Weakness of joy,The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy.
Nevertheless, the game failed to inspire artists to create images of tennis romance after the 1940s. Perhaps this is not surprising. There was no Wimbledon during the Second World War and the grounds themselves suffered bomb damage. Although the tournament recommenced in 1946, it was unable to capture the glamour of the interwar years, with strict rationing impacting on all aspects of British society. The golden era of British tennis was over. The 1950s were dominated by American players and the 1960s and early 70s by Australians, until Ann Jones revived interest in Britain. The sport was simply no longer a mainstream British pastime and, as such, British artists were rarely inspired by it as a subject.
Urban TennisLawn tennis is more closely associated in artistic representations with the British countryside rather than with inner cities. Mary Adshead’s poster Country Joys on London’s Underground of 1927 has a tennis court and players at the centre and it appears to confirm the assumption that one needs to travel out of the city to enjoy the game. Yet tennis was played in cities from the moment it
was invented. There are early glimpses of tennis in London in a watercolour by an unknown artist of Sydenham (private collection), and in Paris in Jacques-Emile Blanche’s Partie de Tennis (fig. 3.21). London witnessed the foundation of clubs at Ealing in 1882 and The Queen’s Club in 1887. Initially a general sports club in Kensington, the latter soon became dominated by lawn tennis. Municipalities also began to recognise that leafy city parks could accommodate courts for a growing urban population eager to play. This was especially the case in London: home to a number of tournaments in addition to the Wimbledon Championships, and in this way enabling a broader base of spectators to enjoy the sport.
In the modern metropolis that was Edwardian London, the game was played in Hyde Park and other open spaces away from the bustle of city life. This was the subject of James Wallace’s tiny sketch, A Game of Tennis in Battersea Park (fig. 4.20), dating from early in his career in 1904. The drawing was slipped into a letter sent to friends back home in Berwick (a group known as The Quintet) as part of a report on the pleasures of city life.29 A few years later Spencer Frederick Gore also painted a number of pictures of tennis in London. Gore had been in contact with Lucien Pissarro, who had settled in London, and learned from him about the techniques of the French Impressionists.30 Gore was tall and athletic and, as the son of the first winner of Wimbledon, he was a keen sportsman who enjoyed cricket and tennis. He painted more traditional tennis scenes such as Tennis at Hertingfordbury (fig. 4.21) at his mother’s home in Hertfordshire, but it was the series of paintings from the front room he had leased at 31 Mornington Crescent that was to make his most important contribution to tennis art. The courts at Mornington Crescent, one of Camden Town’s principal thoroughfares, were open to a wide
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Fig. 4.20 James Wallace, A Game of Tennis
in Battersea Park, 1904, watercolour on paper,
Berwick-on-Tweed Museum and Art Gallery
James Wallace exhibited a number of views of London parks
at the turn of the century such as Autumn in Kensington
Gardens and In the Park. This tiny sketch, dating from
1904, was made in Battersea Park and was slipped in with
a letter back home to The Quintet – a group of friends
in Berwick, Wallace’s home town. It shows Londoners
enjoying vigorous exercise, from a pretty young girl in
the foreground to an energetic male player reaching for
an ambitious overhead shot. A further black and white
drawing made in 1900 by Wallace is entitled Tennis in
London (Berwick-on-Tweed Museum and Art Gallery).
community as the area was not as exclusive as it is today. In the summer months Gore painted a series of works which captured young women playing the game with the occasional passer-by stopping to observe (fig. 4.22). After Gore’s premature death his friend Walter Sickert praised these views looking ‘down on the garden’ where the ‘trees rise and droop in fringes, like fountains, over the little well of greenness and shade where parties of young people are playing at tennis’.31 Sadly, the leafy gardens Gore painted were swept away in 1926 to build a cigarette factory. Laura Knight, likewise influenced by Impressionist art, observed life from an upstairs room. In this case she views a court in a neighbouring garden from her home in exclusiveSt John’s Wood (fig. 4.23).
During the interwar years it was in seaside towns that public tennis courts were most common. Whereas such courts had been exclusive to expensive hotels, now the ordinary holiday maker staying at a
boarding house, as well as local residents, could enjoy the sport. And this was the environment in which Eric Ravilious was raised in Eastbourne. He was naturally athletic, enjoyed boxing and playing hockey, croquet, bowls and football, but his favourite sport was tennis which he was able to watch at Devonshire Park, the home of the annual ladies’ tournament.32 Tennis inspired a number of his engravings as new municipal courts became available to the people of Eastbourne in the grounds of the Towner Art Gallery. A wood engraving, Manor Garden (fig. 4.24) of 1927, shows three players walking to or from a match there. Although Ravilious produced many other tennis subjects for publications, including a number of calendars,33 his best known image of the sport is his triptych, Tennis in the Park (fig. 4.25) of 1930. It has been assumed that the scene was inspired by one of the public courts in the grounds of the Towner. However, despite appearances, Ravilious’s wife recalls that the scene was based on a private court belonging to the wealthy patron, Sir Geoffrey
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Fig. 4.21 Spencer Frederick Gore,
Tennis at Hertingfordbury, c. 1909, oil
on canvas, private collection
Gore was initially influenced by the
Impressionists, especially Camille Pissarro
through his friendship with his son Lucien.
Via his friend, Walter Sickert, he also learnt
about the art of Degas. In this work, which
was almost certainly painted en plein air, he
uses broad brushstrokes of unmediated
colour for the grass. Gore regularly visited
his mother’s house at Hertingfordbury and
found artistic inspiration in the garden,
painting the paths and flower beds. This
is the only image of the grass tennis court
though. The graceful female player in her
blue skirt may be his future wife Mary Kerr.
Fig. 4.22 Spencer Frederick Gore, Tennis
in Mornington Crescent Gardens, 1909,
oil on canvas, private collection
Spencer Gore began a series of paintings
from the front room he had leased at 31
Mornington Crescent showing the surrounding
houses, gardens, tube station and the grass
tennis courts in the communal gardens. This
was then a much more working class area
of London and the courts were open to a
wide community. In a ‘particularly fresh and
sumptuous’ June he followed the lead of the
Impressionist masters and painted the city
landscape, with its tennis courts, from above.
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Fry, who commissioned the work. She recalled: ‘The scene was a garden formally arranged behind a tennis court, on which people were playing tennis. The garden was founded on the Fry’s country house at Oare, Kent, where Eric made drawings of their hard court’.34 The steps up to the grassy bank and the trees are reminiscent of the features in the Manor Garden (fig. 4.24) and the work may be an amalgam of the two sites.
The ambiguities of this scene, which was painted for a central London flat in Portman Square – presumably to remind the patron of his weekend home – epitomises the challenge of painting urban tennis. Since the game was played in parks, surrounding trees perhaps inevitably give the impression of a rural setting.
Fig. 4.23 Laura Knight, Spring in St John’s Wood, 1933, oil on
canvas, National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery
Like Spencer Gore, Knight observed tennis from the window
of her London home. However, she prepared the composition
with two careful drawings in which she records the everyday
activity of the street and the presence of the tennis court. In
the final work, there are more foreground figures and the
hard court is populated by two players. They are accurately
observed, suggesting Knight was familiar with the game.
It is not entirely clear whether this is a public or a private
court, however because it is a single court it probably
belonged to the garden of one of the houses she overlooked.
Fig. 4.24 Eric Ravilious, Manor Garden, 1927,
wood engraving, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
Wood engraving was very popular in the 1920s and Ravilious
made his reputation in this medium before he became
better known as a painter. He was influenced by Thomas
Berwick and Samuel Palmer. In this work three tennis
players make their way to (or from) a match. They appear
to be in the grounds of the Towner Art Gallery (founded
1923) in his native Eastbourne walking by the grassy
mound. A small, carefully worked drawing appears to show
the same figures in action on court (private collection).
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Fig. 4.25 Eric Ravilious, Tennis in the Park, 1930, oil
on board, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
This dynamic game is captured in triptych format. It
was originally intended to decorate the panels of the
music room door of the London flat of Sir Geoffrey
Fry. The athletic poses of the women with their bare
arms and stockingless legs illustrates how much
convention had changed to accommodate the modern
woman. The men look somewhat static, but Ravilious
demonstrates his knowledge of the game in the way
that their eyes follow the ball. The elongated shadows
suggest an evening game, but who is the girl leaving the
court – a spectator off in search of a lost tennis ball?
Going to FranceFrance had a long association for the British as a destination to play tennis. The first lawn tennis club was established in Paris in 1877, set up by a group of Englishmen who lived in the capital at the time.35 The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) himself played the game in the French capital. It is therefore not surprising that a number of British artists created works inspired by tennis in France, particularly on the Riviera where the game became very popular. Paris was the artistic capital of Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century and it was a great attraction for many British and American painters travelling to train there. John Lavery was one of the first artists associated with tennis subjects to travel to France and he later sent his The Tennis Party (fig. 3.1) to the Paris Salon in 1888 where it received a gold medal.36
The Scottish Colourists found in French art a crucial point of reference for the development of their confident and vibrant style. Samuel Peploe attended
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Fig. 4.26 Samuel John Peploe, A Game of
Tennis, Luxembourg Gardens, c. 1906, oil on
board, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
The Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe was
one of many British artists who trained
in Paris. Previously he had painted in an
Impressionistic style, but here he begins to
move away, favouring a more hard edged
approach based on flatter blocks of colour and
cropped compositions under the influence
of Andre Derain and Henri Matisse. This
stunning small oil sketch, with a typically
tight composition full of movement and
colour, captures a game of mixed doubles
in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. It was
probably made on one of Peploe’s earlier trips
to France before he moved there in 1909.
Fig. 4.27 John Duncan Fergusson, At the
Net, Tennis Party, Royan, 1910, crayons
on paper, private collection
In 1910, Ferguson and Peploe spent their first
summer in France together, working on the
south-west Atlantic coast at the fashionable
resort of Royan. Here they produced fresh oil
studies of sailing boats, which were so much
a part of the attraction of the town. Fergusson
also made at least two sketches of tennis
mixed doubles with boats in the distance. This
suggests that he might have worked from the
Royal Ocean Club which overlooked the sea.
In this example, the woman in the foreground
has her arm and racket cropped at the top,
suggesting the influence of photography.
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Fig. 4.28 Christopher Wood, Tennis Players,
c. 1925-6, oil on canvas, private collection
Tennis made a great impact on Wood and
female tennis players at that, having seen and
admired Suzanne Lenglen in action in 1921. This
uncharacteristically large work was probably
painted on the Riviera. There he observed
the English at leisure, and he would also have
been aware of the much hyped match played
in Cannes in 1926 between Suzanne Lenglen
and the young American Helen Wills. Wood’s
serene work concentrates on two calm and
dignified female figures; they may simply be two
wealthy English ladies, but they perhaps refer
to the two great tennis stars about to do battle.
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the Académie Julian in Paris in 1893 and was influenced greatly by Manet’s art. He and his friend and fellow Colourist, John Duncan Fergusson, made many visits to France and both were attracted to the café society and tennis scenes. Peploe’s stunning tiny oil sketch (fig. 4.26), which depicts a game of mixed doubles in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, is full of movement and luminous colour. Peploe returned to Paris in 1909, spending his first summer working with Fergusson at Royan. Fergusson made some energetic sketches of mixed-doubles players with sailing boats in the distance; in this example, the unexpected croppings are reminiscent of photography (fig. 4.27). Peploe returned to Britain in 1912 and Fergusson, having met his long term partner (the dancer Margaret Morris), followed in 1914.
Christopher Wood first visited Paris in 1921 when he enrolled at the Académie Julian. There he met the wealthy Chilean diplomat Antonio de Gandarillas (1886–after 1940) with whom he would have a lifelong relationship. It was Gandarillas who ensured that he
met the leading artists of the day, like Picasso. The young Wood was a keen follower of tennis. In a letter home in 1921 he wrote of his trip to the World Hard Court Championship: ‘Today, Saturday afternoon, I have been to lunch with ... Porce ... the amateur tennis champion for Paris for several years. Afterwards we motored to St Cloud to watch the tennis tournament. Suzanne Lenglen played brilliantly ... She is a very wonderful girl and one can only scarcely believe she is only twenty-two’.37 His Tennis Players (fig. 4.28) was probably painted when he travelled with Gandarillas to the Riviera. Wood’s monumental, calm, still figures seem engrossed in their own thoughts, deep in contemplation perhaps, over their match.
Eric Ravilious’s connection with France came about with his work on the 1937 Paris International Exhibition which was organised under the shadow of the growing threat of European dictatorships. He contributed a model of Lawn Tennis to the sporting section of the British pavilion (fig. 1.17).38 Whilst the German, Italian and Soviet Union pavilions all
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Fig. 4.29 Eric Ravilious, Preparatory Design on
a Grand Theme for ‘Sport’, for the British Pavilion
of the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, 1937,
watercolour on paper, private collection
Ravilious originally suggested that football and cricket be
included in the plans for his stand in the sports section of
the British pavilion, but Oliver Hill, the overall organiser
was keen that he should concentrate on his favourite sport,
tennis. This watercolour shows Ravilious’s first thoughts. In
the next stage (see fig. 1.17), the artist made four plywood
cutout figures convincingly poised for play in front of a
background of spectators in stands. A grass roller was
shown on a large scale above with giant tennis rackets below.
made clear political statements and the Spanish used art to protest against the rise of fascism, displaying Picasso’s Guernica, the British were characteristically understated, promoting their pastimes and sense of ‘fair play’. There were displays on the picturesque countryside and on cricket, golf, fishing, football and, of course, tennis. Originally, Ravilious thought he would combine football and tennis (fig. 4.29), but in the end he was asked to concentrate on tennis. For many visitors, however, the official British desire to distance the country from outright propaganda failed and a concentration on leisure and sport seemed trivial. Storm clouds were growing over France and Britain as another world war loomed. For Shakespeare and Ravilious the consequences would be tragic and the easy links between the two countries were interrupted for a generation.
Tennis Art and Photography‘Comparisons, odious or doubtful, have been made frequently between art and photography. Only recently, with us at least, photography has come to
be considered individually, apart from its recognised value as a medium for portraiture. Today we do not withhold from it the title of an “art in itself ”’, wrote Paul Nash, the landscape and surrealist painter in 1932 (fig. 4.34).39 Artists originally had the advantage over photographers in that they could record the movement involved in a sport such as tennis more convincingly, as well as capturing the game’s atmosphere and lively colours. But developments in the photographic process meant that by the 1920s black and white still photography could illustrate the energetic shots of tennis stars such as Fred Perry (fig. 1.8). Photographers now packed tournaments, eager for action shots, and newspapers widely reproduced these images. Despite the increasing sophistication of sports photography in the 1920s and ‘30s, this period also saw some of the most innovative and outstanding examples of tennis art as artists adapted to the new possibilities offered by photography, using it whenever possible as a tool to further enhance their ability to capture the game on canvas, on paper, or
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in bronze. As Paul Nash observed, ‘the camera’s “eye” proves its incalculable power ... its importance lies, surely, in the wealth of matter it places at the disposal of the modern sculptor or painter’.40
The sculptor Charles Jagger was one such artist who used photographs as an aid; in this case with his informal bronze statuette of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) holding a racket (fig. 4.30). He was accorded a number of sittings, but did not have the chance to observe the prince in his tennis flannels and therefore resorted to using photographs. Jagger based the prince’s pullover on a photograph of him in The Prince of Wales’ Book: A Pictorial Record of the Voyages of H. M. S. ‘Renown’, 1919–1920, though he was in fact dressed for playing squash rather than tennis.41 This image of the relaxed prince is much more sensitively realised than similar commissions such as Orpen’s contemporary portrait of him dressed for golf, in which he looks uneasy and uncomfortable.42
Eric Gill the sculptor, draughtsman and typographer, produced a very different kind of tennis image that same year, also using a photographic source. The Tennis Player (fig. 4.31) is a simple, classic white line wood engraving, based on an image which appeared in The Daily Mirror. The main difference between the photograph and the Gill engraving is that the female player is clothed in the newspaper image. The player’s balletic pose recalls the inspiration that Duncan Grant’s movements on the court had provided for the choreographer, Nijinsky, in 1913. Nude tennis was something of a recurring artistic theme at this time (fig. 4.14).
In 1938 Harold Edgerton, using a stroboscopic flash, succeeded in creating several exposures in a single second, and so produced images which showed glimpses of the middle movements the
Fig. 4. 30 Charles Sargeant Jagger, The Prince
of Wales (later Edward VIII) Dressed for Tennis, 1923,
bronze, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff
This informal portrait of the Prince of Wales is one of
Jagger’s finest works. Commissioned by Lord Esher, a
trusted adviser of the Royal Family, the sculptor was
requested to show the prince in uniform, but he eventually
decided on more informal tennis flannels, smoking a cigar.
The prince knew Jagger and had purchased his work and
this enabled the sculptor to gain a number of sittings. The
prince was a keen player and, like other members of the
royal family, frequently attended Wimbledon. This cast
was donated to the National Museum of Wales in the
artist’s memory in 1936 by Sir William Goscombe John.
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human eye usually could not perceive. The result was an extraordinary image, The Tennis Player, which shows the detailed movement involved in playing a forehand (fig. 4.32). Photography had finally triumphed in capturing the full range of movement on court, even if artists such as the Futurist printmaker Cyril Power had foreseen this eventuality. His innovative linocuts such as Tennis, c. 1933 (fig. 4.33), convey the movement and dynamism of the game through fractured images. This work was inspired by the ‘Bounding Basque’: Jean Borotra, two-times winner of Wimbledon in 1924 and 1926. Power and his partner Sybil Andrews were both fascinated by sport. Between 1929 and 1937 they were invited to produce seven designs for posters advertising sporting events which could easily be reached by train including Wimbledon (fig. 1.16).
While the capacity of photography to capture subtleties of movement inspired some artists to respond with even greater energy, other painters instead reflected on its other quality, stillness. In 1931, Paul Nash’s wife gave him his first camera and one of his most haunting images was a photograph of a tennis ball surrounded by the bark of a tree (fig. 4.34) taken in 1934. The son of a successful lawyer, Nash was educated at St Paul’s School where he probably first played tennis (he also seems to have indulged with his artist friends in Hampstead in the 1920s) so he would have been familiar with the ‘lost ball’ of a tennis match. The photograph also surely relates to his famous Surrealist painting, Event on the Downs, produced the same year on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset (fig. 4.35). The stillness of the giant ball in the painting corresponds to the repose of his photographic study where the same subject is combined with wooden playing blocks, possibly remembered from his childhood. Nash
Fig. 4.31 Eric Gill, The Tennis Player, 1923,
wood engraving, Tate Britain, London
This print is based on a photograph published in The
Daily Mirror in 1923 and it was included in Eric Gill’s
Book of Engravings (1929). This classic simple white line
wood engraving captures a balletic image of the sport
typical of the new generation of sports photography. The
photograph in The Daily Mirror is of a clothed female
tennis player and since it is unlikely that nude tennis was
actually practiced it therefore represents a male fantasy,
the logical outcome of the continuing shift towards less
and less restrictive clothing on court and an interesting
new domain in which to study the human form.
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Fig. 4.32 Harold Edgerton, Swirls and Eddies of a
Tennis Stroke, 1938, gelatine silver print, Birmingham
Central Library, Archives and Heritage
Photographers had been interested in capturing the movement
of a single tennis stroke since the 1870s, as a callotype print by
Edweard Muybridge illustrates. However, early photography
struggled with capturing this movement. It was the American
Harold Edgerton who made the breakthrough when he
first used a stroboscophic flash. As a result, he succeeded
in creating several exposures a second, thus capturing
movements which the eye could not usually perceive. This,
one of his most famous images, was first published in Flash!
Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography, 1939.
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Fig. 4.33 Cyril Power, Tennis, c. 1933, linocut,
Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
Using a bold design suited to the medium of linocut, Power
conveys the movement and dynamism of the game in a
vibrant way, the like of which no other artist achieved.
During this period Power left his wife to join the young artist
Sybil Andrews with whom he had a personal and artistic
partnership. The couple lived and worked together in a small
studio in Hammersmith between 1928–38. They collaborated
under the name Andrew Power to produce striking posters as
can be seen in their design for Wimbledon in 1933 (fig. 1.16).
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