Essays & Articles << In Search of the Blackheath Golfer
In Search of the Blackheath Golfer
A year went by (maybe it was two) during which I bothered countless curators, librarians and art experts to date my print. At best I got guesswork. One day, watching television, I perked up at the sight of a Scot being interviewed in his own private golf museum. Archie Baird must have appreciated old-fashioned letter writing because he replied quickly to mine. He, too, owned a Blackheath print, which, from a basic description, resembled mine. The National Portrait Gallery of Scotland had identified the paper as coming from Holland in the 1850s, he said. As for the original canvas, Archie could only repeat the rumour about the fire -- in India, of all places. He had heard that Abbott the artist had gone insane, and that Capt. Innes was a scoundral, and he left me with the name of a friend in London who might help me learn more. As I penned another piece of snail mail, this time to ‘Bobby Furber’, my enthusiasm boiled again into full-blown travel plans. Thanks to a terrorist scare in the UK, they were almost giving away flights to Glasgow. On the eve of departure, however, I heard that old Bobby was in the hospital and unlikely to recover any time soon.
It’s an hour by car from Glasgow on the Firth of Clyde to Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, and from there another short drive across the Kingdom of Fife to St. Andrews, where, behind the first tee of the Old Course, a concrete bunker is home to the British Golf Museum. I came armed with a small magnifier by which memorized details of my own print could be compared against the original. In the 18th Century Gallery, well-secured within a plexiglass cabinet, I found Valentine Green’s original mezzotint, The Blackheath Golfer.
One look at Innes’ pretty face and I felt at once thrilled and depressed. This black and white version was crisp, almost three dimensional, Innes more alive, standing there so smug in the dress uniform of Captain of the Golfing Society. I tried to imagine my print before its colouration, but who was I fooling? Mine was an imposter. But I couldn’t get close enough to remove all final doubts.
The curator knew nothing about the original oil by Lemuel Abbott. But she confirmed that the golfing portrait was a first. No tradition existed before Innes of commissioning portraits of club champions. There wouldn’t have been a place to hang it, since clubhouses weren’t built until the 1840s. Golfing Societies assembled at the local pub. When they met to play at Blackheath, she said, it was a way of working up an appetite for the more important job of sitting down to dinner. It sounded awfully like a put-down. After all, that famous icon was English and, of course, she and the Museum and everything in it were Scottish. More than ever, I wanted to know the whole story.
You don’t go to St. Andrews without playing the famous links -- unless when you were 19 years old you broke 80 on the Old Course and smuggled your divot off the 18th fairway to make a bedside shrine of it until years later it became a health hazard because it was so fuzzy with mold. Why ruin a priceless memory?
I returned to Edinburgh to visit The Scottish National Portrait Gallery to see what else they knew about Blackheath, but it was closed for a ‘bank holiday’. Time to find Archie in nearby East Lothian and play some goff, but he was gone for the weekend, too. Then, good news -- incoming e-mail from the Royal Blackheath Club. Their social historian heard I was seeking info about the famous portrait.
“I have always believed that the portrait of William Innes was commissioned by him through vanity,” was how the marvelous Neil Rhind started out. It’s possible that fellow Club members urged him to commission the mezzotint, since the painting was dedicated to them. Obsessed with golf, Innes had moved to Blackheath to be closer to that ‘Society of Goffers’. He had even surrounded his house with gates and iron railings shaped like golf clubs. My man in the mezzotint was finally coming alive. But there was more. A successful sugar merchant, Innes had served as a Member of Parliament until he was unseated for corruption in 1775. He was 68 when he hired Abbott to render his likeness. Neil referred to more information in a file ‘not immediately at hand’. It might take him a day or two to find it.
The enigmatic William Innes was on my mind the next day as I drove to Ayrshire on the West Coast. Sixty eight! Innes looked nowhere near 68. Who was he fooling? It’s no wonder he fell further in love with himself and commissioned a print edition of Abbott’s painting, one for each of his admirers.
I headed for one of Troon’s municipal courses and finessed my way into the company of a threesome unloading in the parking lot. Were they interested in showing a foreigner how to play the game? Not at first, so, I was careful to follow in their footsteps, and they were brisk ones -- 18 holes in just over three hours! These gentlemen were out for a walk and they played golf as a celebration of the fact. I witnessed a great rapport of golfer with terrain and turf and wind. They smacked the ball with a variety of organic strokes topped off with plenty of body English and some of the foul-mouthed variety. They played the wind like magicians, carving shots by instinct. I fell into their rhythm, orchestrating the ball into hole after hole as if I’d made a deal with the devil. The logical absurdity of the game is what makes it so compelling and so conducive to friendships made with total strangers in mere hours. They told me that a Blackheath print was for sale at 49 Ayr Street. Unfortunately, I would have to wait until Tuesday.
With nothing else to do on Sunday, I rattled the door of Pringles Antiques, amazed to see a shop so dense with serious old clubs and original golf art, including a black and white Blackheath not very prominant on the wall. In my hand, another dispatch from London -- Neil had obtained a copy of Innes’ will but found no mention of the portrait.
