A house of Provenance
The Links
The oldest game with a written rulebook and a broken heart. The Links is a curatorial reproduction house for golf in art — from the Dutch playing kolf on the ice around 1600, through the founding clubhouse portraits and the Vanity Fair caricatures, to the railway posters and course surveys of the 1920s. Painters, engravers, caricaturists, photographers, and surveyors: every one of them named. The clubhouse wall has always cared about attribution, and so do we.
The Links is a house of Provenance, sibling to Painted Myths and The Poster Atlas. We don’t invent the history; we curate and reproduce it, at museum grade, from sources anyone can check. Every piece on the wall is someone else’s round, and we say whose.
The publicity doctrine
This is the family’s first house of named athletes, and that raises a question copyright alone doesn’t answer. A picture can be perfectly out of copyright and still show a person whose name and likeness someone still owns. So every piece here that depicts a golfer carries a second verdict alongside its rights basis, and the site refuses to publish without it:
- Clear
- A long-deceased British figure with no post-mortem right of publicity in play — Old Tom and Young Tom Morris, the Vanity Fair subjects, the Great Triumvirate. This is the lane the whole house is built on, and everything currently hanging here sits in it.
- Under review
- Figures — largely the American champions — whose names and likenesses are actively licensed today. These are human-gated. Most will never publish, and the honest path for the ones that should is a license, not a clever argument.
- Licensed only
- Publishes solely under an executed license, logged in the registry. We would rather pay an estate than win a technicality against one.
On tours, championships, and club names
You will not find a tour, championship, governing-body, or famous-club mark anywhere in this house’s branding, page titles, keywords, or product names. Not in a collection name, not in a search term. A build-time lint enforces it and fails the deploy if it slips.
Two deliberate exceptions, both narrow. A genuine period artefact may name its own ground — a 1892 Vanity Fair plate captioned for a golfer’s home links, a 1924 survey of a named course — and we reproduce that artefact as the historical document it is, with the naming flagged and signed off. And when you type your own club into your own commemorative, that is your speech, not our marketing: we never pre-populate the field, never autocomplete it, and never suggest a club to you.
The sourcing promise
Every reproduction is traced to a named source and, where the holding institution assigns one, an accession number: the Rijksmuseum’s open-access programme, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Yale Center for British Art, the Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, and archival scans licensed under the family’s Bridgeman framework. House originals — period plates scanned in-house from our own holdings — sit at the top of that ladder as our apex trust line. Source and accession appear on every piece, plainly, as a commitment rather than a footnote.
And where restoration is done, it is disclosed on the piece. We repair what age did to the scan; we do not improve what the artist did.
The registry promise
No piece publishes without a CLEAR verdict, enforced in code at the route and again at build time. Right now that means 42 pieces are hanging and 7 are being held back — some because copyright or a live artist term hasn’t cleared, some because we haven’t yet found a scan good enough to sell. We would rather show you a short wall than an unearned one.
The watch list runs on a clock, not a whim: material whose copyright expires under the 95-year rule unlocks at midnight on the first of January, automatically. The next slate opens January 2027, and nothing can be published early — not by us, not by anyone.
The collections, so far
One house, walked as a round: the first tee, the turn, and the eighteenth.
The Links is a house of the Provenance family, sibling to Painted Myths and The Poster Atlas. Read how the game — and the pictures — were made →
More from the Provenance family
- The Paddock
The horse taught art to look harder. Museum-grade prints of the horse in art — Stubbs to Muybridge, the sporting aquatints, the trotting lithographs, Degas at the rail, the Vanity Fair jockeys — every piece naming painter or firm, horse where known, and the ground. Plus one commission of your own: THE SILKS.