Mark Twain considered the game of golf “a good walk spoiled,” while J. Carter Brown believed games like golf invite us to “leave behind the toils and trouble of daily life in search of pleasure, exercise, and spirited competition.” From Hendrick Avercamp’s seventeenth-century scenes of people playing kolf, a cousin of the game, to Andy Warhol’s portrait of Jack Nicklaus, artists too, have approached the subject of golf from a variety of perspectives. In ninety works from artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Charles Lees, Norman Rockwell, and Andy Warhol, The Art of Golf, organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Galleries of Scotland, explores how European and American artists have depicted the royal and ancient game across four centuries, its origins in Scotland, and its growth in America in the twentieth century.
