There are few connections between golf and fine art that readily come to mind and they are tenuous at best. Movies, yes; photography, obviously; but late 19th century paintings? Not so much. However, the connection between a prized painting from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, ‘The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’ by John Singer Sargent, and The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, may be one rare example.
One needs to go back in time to when the renowned late 19th century painter John Singer Sargent was born to American parents on January 12th, 1856, in the Italian city of Florence. In that same year – 1856 – the first golf course in continental Europe was founded at the spa resort town of Pau in the south of France near the Pyrenees.
Sargent, whose parents traveled constantly in Europe, went on to study painting in Paris at L´École de Beaux Arts and in the studio of renowned French painter Carolus Durand. He successfully completed his studies with a phenomenal portrait of his mentor, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879. Soon after, the young artist embarked on a career in portrait painting, first in Paris, later in London, and then in his parents’ native Boston, USA.
‘The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’ depicts the four daughters of his friends, Edward Darley Boit and his wife Mary Louisa Cushing Boit, also of wealthy Boston family origins. The four daughters are portrayed in their rented Paris apartment, and the eldest daughter Florence (coincidentally the name of Sargent`s birthplace) is the one leaning her back against one of the large Japanese vases depicted. It was painted in 1882, the same year that The Country Club in Brookline was founded by J. Murray Forbes. At that time, there was no golf course and members spent their time hunting and shooting. The focus of the club was a now-defunct race track and the old polo field which ran alongside the first fairway of the present course.
In the early part of 1892, Florence Boit (the same Florence from the painting) learned to play golf on an extended family vacation in France – coincidentally on the golf course in Pau – and became a great enthusiast. In the summer of that same year, she traveled from Europe to America to visit her aunt Jane and Jane’s husband Arthur Hunnewell at their large estate near Boston. With the intention of playing, she took with her a set of golf clubs.
To her dismay however, there were no courses in the Boston area, or even in all of Massachusetts! As a consequence, she persuaded her uncle, under her supervision, to have a primitive 6 hole golf course constructed on his estate near Lake Waban. For the rest of that summer of 1892, the family and invited guests enjoyed the new pastime.
One of the Hunnewell neighbors, Laurence Curtis, became enraptured with the game and decided to petition The Country Club in Brookline to lay out a course. Curtis, who was – like Arthur Hunnewell – a member of the club, wrote in an article which appeared in Golfing Magazine in the 1890s: “After seeing and playing the game, and witnessing the enthusiasm of all who participated in it, I wrote to the executive committee of The Country Club, setting forth that there was a new game called golf, stating that it had been played in Scotland for three hundred years, and that it might readily be introduced at the club; and that the cost of an experimental course need not exceed fifty dollars.”
Thanks to Curtis and Florence Boit, a six-hole course was duly laid out in March of 1893. At the inauguration of the course, Hunnewell hit the first tee shot and miraculously had a hole-in-one. But the assembled spectators, never having witnessed golf before, remained totally impassive, merely assuming that this was a normal occurrence in the game. The golf club then rapidly grew to be one of five charter clubs that founded the United States Golf Association in 1894.
And in 1913, it hosted the U.S. Open, famously won by the local player and former caddie at the club, Francis Ouimet, who beat the world’s foremost British golfers, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in an 18-hole playoff. The world of golf was never to be the same again.
My painted homage to the painter and painting – which you will find in issue 2 – was made in 2022.