Tennis

Lawn tennis was patented by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield in 1874 under the name Sphairistike — a name that fortunately did not survive — and within a decade had become one of the most fashionable sports in Britain and the wider English-speaking world. Its rapid rise was driven by a combination of genuine sporting appeal and social cachet: the game could be played on any level grass surface, required no elaborate infrastructure beyond a net and a set of lines, and was one of the first sports in which men and women competed in the same social space, if not on equal terms or on the same court. The illustrated press of the 1870s and 1880s seized on these qualities enthusiastically, and the prints produced in the game’s first two decades record its social world with considerable vividness and charm.

The earliest lawn tennis illustrations typically depicted mixed doubles on private lawns, with players in the elaborate dress of the period — long skirts and bustles for the women, flannel suits and sometimes top hats for the men. These images are as much social documents as sporting illustrations: they record the garden party world of the English upper-middle class in the late Victorian period, a world defined by leisure, propriety and the careful management of social interaction between the sexes. The net across which the players rallied was in more ways than one a metaphor for the social conventions it simultaneously enforced and allowed to be negotiated.

Wimbledon, which held its first championship in 1877, quickly became the focal point of the illustrated tennis press. The early championships at the All England Club attracted artists as well as spectators, and the prints produced from these occasions document the evolution of the game from informal garden entertainment to serious competitive sport. The champions of the early Wimbledon era — William Renshaw, who won seven titles; the Doherty brothers; Charlotte Cooper — became subjects of portrait illustration and sporting biography, and their likenesses appeared in the illustrated newspapers and sporting annuals of the period.

Caricature and comic illustration found ready material in lawn tennis, as they did in golf and other sports associated with fashionable society. The earnestness of competitive players, the elaborate etiquette of the Victorian tennis party, the comic potential of the unfamiliar equipment and rules — all provided material for the artists of Punch and similar publications, and the resulting images capture the social comedy of the game’s early years with a wit that reads freshly today.

The spread of lawn tennis through the British Empire and to the United States, France and the rest of Europe produced a wider illustrative tradition. Australian, American and continental European tennis scenes appear in the illustrated press from the 1880s onwards, documenting the game’s rapid globalisation and the diverse social worlds in which it took root. The Davis Cup, first contested in 1900, marked the beginning of international competition and attracted its own illustrative attention.

For collectors, antique tennis prints represent one of the more accessible areas of Victorian sporting art. Original examples from the game’s founding decades are genuinely scarce — the illustrated newspaper tradition from which most survive was not designed for preservation — and they combine historical interest with strong decorative qualities and an obvious connection to a sport that remains central to the cultural calendar.