Is this painting worth £800,000? Royal Blackheath Golf Club certainly hope so

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henry-callender-painting painting-henry-callender

henry-callender-painting

You have to do something pretty special to have a massive painting of you hung in the golf clubhouse. Winning the midweek stableford probably isn’t going to cut it.

Henry Callender was the General Captain of Royal Blackheath Golf Club, the oldest golf club in England. This portrait of him, which dates back to around 1790, has been hanging in the clubhouse for more than two centuries, but will soon go up for auction, where it may raise as much as £800,000. Understandably, the club have not taken the decision to sell it lightly. 

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“We’re terribly disappointed that we feel we need to sell this, and the only reason we would do so is that we’ve got a unique opportunity to buy the freehold of the golf club,” says past captain Rod Baker. “It’s the only reason that we could even contemplate selling something like that, to secure our future: they have offered it to us and the members are doing what they can to raise the funds to do that.”

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