Notes

Tretchikoff was keen on portraying rugby or tennis players, but Football, also known as Football Players, is probably the only soccer-themed painting in his oeuvre. The artist has often been denounced for painting only what the public liked, but the accusation is hardly fair. When Tretchikoff did paint to please, it was usually a calculated gamble. He needed a special reason to choose footballers as his subject.

Tretchikoff’s first British show had taken place at Harrods, with an attendance of 205 000. In the early 1970s, he was preparing for his second exhibition, to be held at Rackhams, the Harrods group’s department store in Birmingham. Harry Dare, a Birmingham building contractor with business interests in South Africa, visited the artist at his studio in Cape Town. Dare, the owner of two Tretchikoff canvases, recounted: ‘He was doing a rugby painting, and I said to him, ‘It’s no good, that. If you’re coming to Birmingham, you’ll have to have a round ball.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Tretchi says to me. ‘Soccer’, I said. Three weeks later, he started it and here it is.’

Football was one of the highest-priced works among the forty that Tretchikoff took to Birmingham in 1972. The artist’s six-week exhibition attracted 132 000 visitors and proved to be his most lucrative. Shows in Manchester and Edinburgh followed.

In this painting, we see a game between Birmingham City and Celtic. The attacking player wears the blue and white home colours of the Birmingham team. Dare, a director of City football club, opined that the player resembled Keith Coombes, the son of the Birmingham City chairman Clifford Coombes. Under the leadership of Coombes Snr, the team reached an FA Cup semi-final in the 1971–72 season. Keith Coombes later succeeded his father as chairman of the club.

Football, a painting that was meant to cater to English tastes, returned to Tretchikoff’s home country and entered a South African private collection. It was purchased by the current owner from an auction at Stephan Welz & Co in 1994. The price paid was the highest for a Tretchikoff at the time.

Boris Gorelik

Provenance

Stephan Welz & Co, Johannesburg, 30 August 1994, Lot 367 (titled Football Players).