Tennis Prints: Wimbledon by Arthur Hopkins

Both are after Arthur Hopkins, a name worth knowing. Hopkins was born in Stratford in east London in 1848 and trained at the Royal Academy schools. He spent his working life as a watercolourist and illustrator, on the staff of the Illustrated London News from 1873 and contributing to The Graphic and Punch, and he was elected a full member of the Royal Water-Colour Society in 1896. He was also the younger brother of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and two of his other brothers were graphic artists. It was a family that drew.

What makes his tennis scenes worth hanging is that they come from the era when the illustrated weeklies were how the country saw its sport. There was no photography in the papers to speak of, so an artist went to the ground, watched, and drew what happened. The result is not a diagram of a match. It is a picture of a crowd: the hats, the parasols, the deportment of people watching a game that was still fairly new to them, arranged around a rectangle of grass in south-west London.

Lawn tennis was only codified in the 1870s and the Wimbledon championships began in 1877. Within a decade or two the tournament had gone from a garden-party novelty to a national fixture, and these prints catch it somewhere in that stretch, while it was becoming the thing it has been ever since.

Both prints are eighteen pounds. They are printed on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, have stayed in their wrapping since the day they were bought, and have never been hung or displayed. Sizes fit a standard off-the-shelf frame and mount.

They work well as a pair, and that is how most people take them. Hung together they make a decent present for anyone who takes a fortnight off in June, and they sit rather better in a hallway or a study than a modern action photograph would.

If you are looking for other sporting subjects, it is worth asking. We are a small family business, we have been selling prints for over twenty years, and we are happy to go and check what else we have.