Printer Friendly Version - Mad About Missing March Madness? Yale Art Gallery Offers Fun and Games

A Game of Croquet, painting by Winslow Homer. Author David Park Curry wrote, “Croquet embodies deep and strong currents—sex and aggression—that made it a compelling subject.” The game experienced a “meteoric rise in popularity” in the last half of the 19th century.

Depressed about the Derby? Glum about the Games? Yale University Art Gallery is offering sports-themed audio tracks to lift the spirits of sports junkies.

• To learn more about the Aztec god of pleasure, games, and music, visit artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/81539

• Want to hear about the oldest continuously played sport in the world? Click here artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/10950

• Additional sports-related audio resources are available on Yale University Art Gallery’s SoundCloud account at soundcloud.com/yaleartgallery, including information about an equestrian shrine figure.

Objects on view in the art gallery’s virtual collection online include a work by Winslow Homer, A Game of Croquet.

“During the 1860s, Winslow Homer undertook the earliest sustained treatment of croquet to appear in fine art. The game was a recent English import. Immediately popular, it provided women with a rare socially acceptable opportunity to compete on equal footing with men in an outdoor sport. The object of the game is to hit one’s ball, using a mallet, through a succession of wickets, while trying to deter one’s opponents from doing the same by ‘croqueting’ their balls, launching them farther afield. The playfully vindictive nature of the game imbued the sport with a flirtatious ingredient that is featured in another, contemporary version of this composition in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago showing a male figure kneeling between the two women.”

• Robert Slifkin, “The Gilded Age: Catalogue Entries: 202. Winslow Homer, A Game of Croquet, 1866,” in Helen A. Cooper, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, 2008. (www.aaeportal.com—search the title)

• Jon Sterngass, “Cheating, Gender Roles, and the Nineteenth-Century Croquet Craze,” Journal of Sport History, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Fall 1998). (www.jstor.org—search the title)

• David Park Curry, Winslow Homer: The Croquet Game, Yale University Art Gallery, 1984. (artgallery.yale.edu—search the title)