The Home Hole at Shinnecock

1995
Serigraph
Image size 15 5/8" x 25 3/4" (39.69 x 656.41 cm)
A limited edition of 450 numbered impressions; 75AP, 6PP, signed by the artist When the United States Gof Association decided to throw a party at New York City's Walkdorf-Astoria in honor of its centennial anniversary, it looked to only one artist to celebrate the event--- LeRoy Neiman. Neiman agreed to accept a special commission to paint the eighteenth hole at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, the site of this year's U.S. Open. The Shinnecock HIlls Golf Club, ranked by Golf Magazine as one of the ten greatest courses in the world, is a fitting test for golf's greatest shotmakers, as well as for its favorite artist. Neiman manages to convey both the challenge and the beauty of this remarkable course in his treatment of the eighteenth hole. The sand trap which stretches menacingly across the image's foreground is familiar to anyone who has played Shinnecock: more than 150 bunkers are strategically situated so as to intimidate even the most accomplished professional. The "home hole" can be reached only by making a long drive over the undulating fairway and then negotiating the bunkers and rough to attain the small green. But Neiman also brings an artist's eye to the visual pleasures of the course. With its windswept contours and treeless fairways, Shinnecock feels, in the artist's phrase, like "a rare, wee bit of Scotland" here in the U.S. The eighteenth is even decorated with small, bright patches of purple thistle. The clubhouse, a white-shingled country house designed in 1892 by Stanford White, overlooks the scene from atop a modest hill behind the gallery. Particularly astute collectors will find hidden in the gallery LeRoy Neiman's special acknowledgment of this year's festivities at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club.