How the game was made
Feather, Gutty, Haskell
Golf did not evolve because anyone improved the swing. It changed four times because the ball changed — and each time the ball changed, the clubs, the courses, the prices, and the people all changed with it. Every picture in this house is filed under the ball that was in play when it was made. Knowing which one is how you see it.
Kolf — the ice game
Before the links, the ice. The Dutch played colf and kolf through the seventeenth century with a heavy curved club and a leather ball, on frozen waterways and in walled courts, and their painters recorded it as ordinary winter business — the players share the ice with skaters, drunks, dogs, and a man selling something hot. Whether this is golf’s ancestor or its cousin is an argument four hundred years old and no closer to settled. What is not in doubt is that Avercamp and van der Neer were painting people hitting a ball with a stick toward a mark, in the cold, for no particular reason. That part is unmistakably the game.
The feather ball — the gentleman’s game
A featherie was made by boiling a top hat’s worth of goose feathers and forcing them, still wet, into a stitched leather sphere, which was then hammered hard and painted. It took a skilled maker most of a day to produce a handful, they cost more than a club, and they were ruined by rain. That single fact shaped the century: golf in the feather era was necessarily the property of men who could afford to lose several shillings into a whin bush. This is the era of the founding portraits — Innes at Blackheath, Inglis at Leith, and Lees’ grand match at St Andrews — and it is why the earliest golf pictures are, almost without exception, pictures of the gentry in club uniform.
The gutty — the game democratised
Around 1848 someone discovered that gutta-percha — a hard latex from Malayan trees, shipped to Britain as packing material — could be heated, rolled into a ball, and cooled. It cost a fraction of a featherie, it survived rain, and it could be remoulded when it split. Golf became affordable within a decade, clubs multiplied, and the professional appeared: a working man who made clubs, kept the green, and could beat the members. Old Tom Morris and his son ran this era; Vanity Fair began caricaturing golfers in it. Curiously, players soon found that a scuffed gutty flew farther than a smooth one — the accidental discovery of the dimple, and the first hint that the game’s physics were stranger than its manners.
The haskell — the rubber core, and the railway
In 1898 Coburn Haskell wound rubber thread under tension around a core and wrapped it in gutta-percha. The ball went farther for less effort, forgave a poor strike, and made every existing course slightly too short. Golf’s modern, mass, transatlantic age begins here — and so does its tourism: the railway companies built hotels beside links, commissioned posters to sell them, and turned a Scottish pastime into a holiday. This is the era of Crombie’s Rules plates, the golfing girl, the great travel posters, and Alister MacKenzie surveying the Old Course as though it were a body on a table.
| Era | Years | What it changed |
|---|---|---|
| Kolf — the Ice Game | 1600–1700 | The Dutch winter game played with a curved club and a leather ball, on the ice. The ancestor. Painted centuries ago — public domain many times over. |
| The Feather Ball | 1700–1848 | A boiled top-hat of goose feathers sewn into a stitched leather sphere — hand-made, expensive, and the reason the early game was a gentleman’s game. The era of the founding portraits and the Grand Match. Pre-1931 publication clears under the family’s U.S.-seller framework. |
| The Gutty | 1848–1900 | Gutta-percha, moulded and cheap, democratised the game overnight — and Old Tom Morris and the Vanity Fair champions ran the era. Pre-1931 publication clears under the family’s U.S.-seller framework. |
| The Haskell — the Rubber Core | 1898–1930 | Coburn Haskell’s wound rubber-core ball (1898) flew farther than anything before it and carried golf into its modern, mass, railway-borne age — Crombie’s Rules, the golfing girl, the travel posters, the surveyed course. Pre-1931 publication clears under the family’s U.S.-seller framework. |
And how the pictures were made
The game changed by the ball; the pictures changed by the trade. A 1790 mezzotint is worked backwards — the plate is roughened all over until it prints solid black, and the engraver then burnishes the highlights back out of the dark, which is why the Blackheath Golfer glows the way it does. A Vanity Fair plate is a chromolithograph: one drawn stone per colour, locked in register, flat and saturated. And by Old Tom’s last decades the camera had arrived, and the game acquired its first pictures that could not flatter anybody.
| Trade | The look | Where you’ll see it |
|---|---|---|
| Mezzotint | Velvet blacks and smoky mid-tones, worked from dark to light; no line, only tone | The Blackheath Golfer, 1790 |
| Oil on canvas | The clubhouse portrait and the crowd scene — reproduced from the holding gallery’s own scan | Allan, Lees, and the Company portraits |
| Chromolithograph | Flat, saturated stone-drawn colour, one stone per hue — the Vanity Fair plate | The Spy caricatures, 1890–1906 |
| Photograph (albumen & halftone) | Grey, granular, and unarguable — the first pictures that could not flatter | Old Tom, Young Tom, the Triumvirate |
| Survey plan | Ink contour and hand lettering; a course drawn as an anatomist draws a body | MacKenzie’s Old Course, 1924 |
Sized to the scan that survives
One promise about how we print. A reproduction can only be as good as the scan beneath it, and the surviving scans of golf’s early pictures vary enormously — a Rijksmuseum open-access file runs to six thousand pixels across; a period Vanity Fair plate may survive only as a few hundred. So we cap every piece at the largest size its own scan can hold cleanly, and where the honest answer is “this one shouldn’t be printed large,” we say so on the page and sell you the file instead. You will never be sold a soft print here by a shop that knew better.
Read how this house sources, clears, and publishes every piece →