Golf Art of England

England took up golf later than Scotland, and its first great courses were built by clubs searching deliberately for links land like the Scots had. They found it on two coasts. On the northwest coast, along the shore of Lancashire between Liverpool and Blackpool, a belt of sandhills runs for miles and holds a string of championship courses. In the southeast, around Sandwich in Kent, there are towering dunes beside Pegwell Bay and the English Channel.

Linda Hartough's English paintings come from both. Royal Birkdale, at Southport, lays its fairways along the valleys between tall dunes covered with willow scrub, so that the golf is relatively level while the sandhills rise on either side like grandstands. Its white Art Deco clubhouse, built to look like a ship, is among the most recognizable in the game. A few miles up the coast, Royal Lytham & St Annes is a links hemmed in by houses and a railway, out of sight of the sea, which makes its challenge through the number and placement of its bunkers; it opens with a par 3 and finishes in front of a large red-brick clubhouse. Royal St George's, in Kent, is built on a grander scale, with heaving fairways among huge dunes and one of the tallest bunkers in championship golf.

The character of English links golf follows from that ground: firm turf, fescue grasses, deep bunkers and wind that changes a course's length from one day to the next. It also follows from history. Royal St George's hosted the first Open Championship played outside Scotland, in 1894, and the three courses together have hosted The Open more than three dozen times; Royal Birkdale hosted it for the eleventh time in 2026.

The collection's English paintings are of the finishing holes and clubhouses at Birkdale and Lytham and of the 17th at Royal St George's.