We can argue until we are blue in the face whether a golf course is a work of art.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines art as ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination… producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’. In architecture, whether buildings or golf, there is obviously creative skill and imagination, but the works are appreciated primarily for their function – as an office, a home… or a golf course. So, the point is very definitely moot.

What is not, at all, debatable is that, throughout the game’s history, golf courses have been a popular subject for artists. The earliest golf pictures were generally of golf matches – what is believed to be the first painting featuring golf, now titled, ‘View of St Andrews from the Old Course’, by an unknown artist, dates from about 1740 and now belongs to the Royal and Ancient. The most famous such image is ‘The Golfers’ by Charles Lees from 1847, depicting a match at St Andrews between Sir David Baird and Sir Ralph Anstruther against Major Hugh Lyon Playfair and John Campbell of Glen Saddel, which now belongs to the National Galleries of Scotland.

The depiction of golf courses purely as subjects for landscape painting came later. To this day, the most famous are those painted by the prolific New Zealand-born, but English-resident illustrator Harry Rountree for Bernard Darwin’s book, The Golf Courses of the British Isles (1910).

Now, Rountree’s style is highly evocative of its time, but his style initially developed in isolation from what was going on in the art world at the time. “Though I had done hundreds of drawings before I made the voyage of twelve thousand miles to London, I had never seen an original – except my own – and I was simply dying to see the little bits of Bristol-board containing the work of the men I most admired in the English illustrated magazines and papers,” he told the Boy’s Own Paper in a 1909 interview.

The reproductions that the young Rountree saw in the papers that made the long journey to New Zealand must have helped develop his style, which, at least in his landscapes, has a soft, almost Impressionistic feel to it – which is perhaps not surprising for an artist who learned this way, rather than from studying contemporary painters – by then, the Impressionists were, in pure art terms, yesterday’s news.

Architect Tripp Davis has an interesting take on Rountree’s work, suggesting it is not great golf art. “I love Rountree, but not for golf courses – for landscapes,” he says. “His work didn’t really show the substance of the golf all the time, but his painting of landscapes is amazing.

“Defining substance as the details that impact the way a hole plays, Rountree was doing more Impressionistic brush strokes, which doesn’t lend itself to detail, and his perspective was often very broad to show the scale of the landscape. He did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the landscape and I would not want that to change, but the detail and scale doesn’t capture the substantive details. I don’t think it was meant to.”

In his long and busy career, Rountree did not paint a lot more golf, though he did do a beautiful series of five of the New course at Sunningdale, Moor Park, Walton Heath, Rye and the then brand new Red course at the Berkshire in 1930; they appeared in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. A number of other artists have followed him, including the influential American impressionist Childe Hassam and the Irishman Sir John Lavery. The golf writer Charles Ambrose, whose greatest claim to fame might just be dissuading developer Walter Tarrant from his original idea to have 20 potential residents each lay out a hole to create the St George’s Hill course, and to provide the opportunity for Harry Colt to create one of his greatest works, mostly drew portraits of other golfers in pen and ink. But Ambrose – who seems to have lived his life as a gentleman amateur – never appears to have worked, except for his time in the trenches during the First World War. He also drew beautiful sketches of golf holes – his rendition of Tom Simpson’s new ninth hole at Woking is especially charming.

Ambrose was not a golf architect, but he clearly moved in those circles – his drawing of the then partners Simpson and Herbert Fowler at work sits the shorter Simpson at a drawing table to make the reader notice the height of the six-foot three-inch Fowler. Simpson himself, like a lot of architects across history, was a notable artist: his drawings in charcoal are a particular favourite of the golf architect Thad Layton. Simpson’s bunker drawings are particularly distinctive, as, to be fair, were his bunkers – surely no-one has ever drawn such jagged edges?

In today’s uber-competitive golf architecture market, distinctive drawings, whether executed using manual methods, or on a computer, give a definite boost to a designer. Layton, himself an excellent artist, says: “Most of my current work is renovations. The ability to render a layer of what’s possible on top of an existing hole has been a great way to communicate ideas and win work as well as painting the picture for the contractor when construction starts. I’ve been drawing golf courses since I was a kid – I’ve never stopped! One of the biggest lessons I learned at university was the value of drawing to understand composition – it was an indispensable tool for truly seeing an object in a way that snapping a picture could never replicate.”

Probably the first golf architect who was known for his art almost as much as his work was the late Mike Strantz, who used his watercolour painting skills to brief his shapers on how he wanted holes to look. If you have seen any of Strantz’s work, this isn’t hard to believe: words like ‘artistic’ and even ‘painterly’ spring immediately to mind when viewing the forms he created.

Strantz’s influence is strong and wide. Davis, another fine artist, says he doesn’t feel he can ever reach that standard, but it doesn’t stop him trying. “I don’t think I am near as good as Mike Stranz was, but I learned a lot from his pencil and brush strokes,” he explains. “I started drawing plan view sketches of golf holes when I was 13 or 14, when I did my own yardage books for tournaments I was playing in and I eventually sketched concept holes. I didn’t start doing perspective sketches until I became a golf architect, mainly focusing on bunkers in detail or how they fit in the landscape to impact how you see a shot. Kyle Downs, who works for me, is really good and I have learned from him too. Good sketches have good scale – every part of the sketch has the same sense of scale, so others can see and feel what the sketch is trying to convey. 

“At first my sketching was completely about communicating with shapers and construction crews,” says Davis. “A lot of our clients have taken to wanting to frame these and hang them around the club. I have in the last few years also started to use Photoshop to ‘paint’ options in perspective, which has become a way to show a potential client our ideas. Pencil sketches can more easily show detail and ground movement, while the Photoshop paintings show more wow. I can do these ‘paintings’ in smaller areas on a smaller scale, but I am always amazed at the quality graphic companies like Harris Kalinka can do on a large scale.”

Don Placek, principal at Renaissance Golf Design, is another that is known for illustrative drawings and routing maps. “My dad was a teaching professional by trade, so I have been around golf my entire life,” he says. “My parents encouraged drawing and sketching for as long as I can recall. I was never any good at illustrating people or faces and not too good at animals either, but for some reason landscapes came easy… largely because I was out on a golf course as often as time would allow!

“My parents always influenced and encouraged my interest. But a good deal of inspiration came from the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly his concept sketches. Full of detail but still rough around the edges. Also, there was the late Ann B. Timbermann who worked with Perry O. Dye, Pete’s son, at Dye Designs in Denver, Colorado, as his art and image director when I interned there during my senior year at University of Colorado, Boulder.

“I suppose my drawings have played a role in several capacities over the years – early in my career for Tom Doak my work was used to get clients to envision how a hole might look ahead of construction and as a sales pitch too. As Tom’s career exploded there was no need for that for long! And he didn’t like the idea that a client would latch on to how something was ‘supposed to look’, as it handcuffed him in the field where his live ideas and edits are the essence of his work and what makes his designs what they are! Over the last ten or so years clients have commissioned me to produce stylised drawings of their courses in an as-built form... along with hole-by-hole illustrations, yardage books, trophy prints and the like.”

Like Strantz, David Kahn began his career in the Fazio organisation. He has drawn and painted for considerably longer though. “I have always been both artistically inclined and a golfer,” he says. “I started playing golf at 18 months old and was drawing/painting not terribly long afterwards. When I was seven, I vividly remember merging the two together. I would get in trouble at school for not paying attention; instead drawing golf holes in my notebooks.

“As a kid, I loved Picasso. I would emulate his quirky style all the time and even teachers started to take notice – I only learned that as an adult when my parents told me. Throughout college I was influenced by the artistic hands of many structural architects and city planners, notably Frederick Law Olmsted and Frank Lloyd Wright. I studied books on sketching and simply tried to copy the different styles and see which one came more naturally. Eventually a morphing of everything I consumed led to how I draw, and honestly that is continually evolving.

“In the early days of Jackson Kahn, my artwork got people to stop and listen to us. Without those visuals we might not have landed some of our first jobs. Being able to communicate a vision that is in your head is a thousand times more powerful with a graphic than with words. Words can be mistranslated, while a picture is clearly communicated. Just like highly acclaimed golf courses, visuals are important. The strategies and math of design are extremely critical, but if the visuals fall short, most people aren’t attracted to the scene or environment in the same manner. We all love looking at beautiful, inspiring things. I look at my artwork the same way. Shapers seem to really love a perspective sketch to shape from as opposed to a plan view: it helps them see more of the third dimension that is in our brains.”

Canadian architect Ian Andrew has drawn in pencil for many years but is a more recent convert to paint. “I started drawing landscapes by hand at university, in pencil only,” he says. “I did illustrate some work when I was with Doug Carrick, but producing Photoshop images was so much faster. I only began painting in watercolour in 2020. My golf paintings are OK, but some of my other work is better. I paint for fun – I know what I will do in retirement!”

And there is at least one man who became a golf designer purely through his artwork. David Hoekstra was runner-up in the 2009 Alister MacKenzie Lido competition, which for many years has invited anyone to submit renderings of proposed hole designs, in the same way as Dr MacKenzie did when the original contest was run by Country Life magazine back in 1914. Hoekstra’s elder brother saw the competition advertised and nudged his brother to enter. In 2011, he won the contest; he did so again in 2018, and in 2022 he started Hoekstra Golf Design.

“I distinctly remember drawing golf courses, and designing holes, around the words in our church bulletin as a kid,” he says. “I’ve been around golf my whole life, between playing junior golf, high school golf, playing in college, being a superintendent for three years, my kids playing golf, and now hopefully building a career in architecture. The turning point for me was 2009, and a nudge from my older brother to submit an entry for the Lido competition. I honestly knew nothing about it, but it definitely caught my attention. That year, I ended up being the runner-up, and I fell in love with the competition. In 2011, with a design that had to essentially be played backwards, I had the honour of winning and was invited to attend the annual gathering at Claremont CC in Oakland, California. I met Ron Whitten, Jim Urbina and Brian Costello, that year’s judge. It was my first time playing a MacKenzie design, and I was absolutely blown away. Claremont, at roughly 6,000 yards, was probably the most difficult course I’ve ever played, and probably the most mentally exhausting as well.

“The next big event in my design journey happened in 2014, when I finished runner up, again, in the Lido competition. I reached out to Jay Blasi, that year’s judge, and basically asked what I can do to continue to work towards my dream. The winner that year submitted a digital painting of his winning design, so Jay advised me to give digital painting a try. If I could get really good at it, it would be another option that I could possibly offer, to do conceptual renderings. It’s been a great tool, and something I thoroughly enjoy doing. The icing on the cake was once again winning the Lido in 2018, and to be able to play two MacKenzie gems, Alwoodley and Moortown, in Leeds, England. To this day, Alwoodley is still my favourite course, ever.

“Since starting my business in 2022, the ability to do digital renderings has been extremely valuable in the design process. At first, posting my renderings and sketches on my social media pages gave me the much-needed exposure as a new business starting out. It’s a great tool, and I owe a lot to social media, as most of my business has come from it. As my business started to grow, the role of renderings played a new role. They are helpful with construction crews and understanding the finished product. They are also a great tool when presenting to club boards and members, as most people want to have an idea of what things will look like when finished. I have also done, and continue to do, renderings for other architects, which has been really great as well.”