Billiards and curling win
John McEwen
SPORT AND THE ARTIST, VOLUME I: BALL GAMES by Mary Ann Wingfield
The Antique Collectors Club, £29.95, pp. 359
Ball games, on the evidence of this book, have not been very well served by painters, particularly in the 20th century, when they have become almost entirely the province of the camera. In fact, confronted by a few slick paintings copied from photographs, one feels that the author would have done better to go the whole artistic hog and include photography.
The sports that come off best pictorially in this survey are billiards and curling. 'La Partie de Billiard' by Jean Beraud (1840- 1936) shows one reason why: the fun that can be had with diamonds of green and flights of yellow lamps. Van Gogh makes even more of the lamps in his 'Le Café de Nuit' — they eradiate everything, even depriving the felt of its green. But it is usually the darkness surrounding billiards that lends it form and romance for the painter. Curling represents the popular opposite of this cosiness, taking place on remote lochs at dead of winter. It offers the artist the chance to be as jovial or romantic as he pleases.
Perhaps the most disappointing chapter visually is the one on soccer or 'Association Football'. Foreign artists are included else- where, so why no Douanier Rousseau, Delaunay or, most of all, de Stael to jolly this one up? Even so, it's odd that soccer, rugby and their derivatives have not attracted more artistic attention. Today one fears it is too late because all the strips have been ruined by a combination of advertising, nylon and needless altera- tion. Eton surely has the loveliest collec- tion of colours ever invented, most of them incorporating celestial blue in honour of Our Lady, but no one seems to have thought of painting them. The Field Game is described here but not illustrated. Inclu- sion of photography would have allowed one immortal image of it, a snap by Cartier-Bresson.
Most of the text is beneficially devoted to the games and not the art. It reminds us how much the world owes the English public schools — codifiers and/or inventors of rugby (Rugby), squash (Harrow), fives (Eton), soccer (the lot) — and to us in general for sorting out golf, cricket, tennis, snooker, bowls, badminton, croquet and hockey, to name the most obvious. Even racquets was invented here, by the bored inmates of the Fleet Prison. It would seem that only the Welsh have failed to invent anything. As for jokes, it is good to be reminded that Lord Palmerston expired on a billiard table having suffered a heart attack while in hot pursuit of a housemaid. Baseball, ping-pong, water polo, volley ball go unsaluted. Presumably any painting of them, however inept, would qualify as a delectable collectible on grounds of rarity alone. Painters in search of a subject, take heed.
'La Partie de Billiard', by Jean Beraud
Previous page
