This photo from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows a tennis trophy designed by McClelland Barclay (1891-1943) and presented to the Maidstone Club.
During the tennis and golf club’s storied history, it hosted a wide variety of sports competitions and tournaments at which winners received many different trophy platters and cups. One of the most unique trophies awarded by the club was this sporting figure designed by Barclay, an illustrator, sculptor, painter, and jewelry designer.
Barclay lived a brief but celebrated life, by the 1930s becoming a successful and highly sought-after illustrator, providing covers for popular periodicals like Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. It was during this time that he was hired as a faculty member at Hilton Leech’s Amagansett Art School. Leech himself was a painter and muralist who frequented the East End.
Barclay’s tenure at the school was brief, but his local impact was great — he had a solo show at Guild Hall in 1937 and created a special illustration of Lion Gardiner for The Star’s 50th anniversary celebration. He was well known for his illustrations of stylish sporting figures, which he used to great effect in recruiting posters he made for the U.S. military in World Wars I and II.
Barclay’s talent for depicting the human form in dynamic motion is represented well in the tennis trophy, which captures and exaggerates the kinetic energy of a player lunging forward to return a serve. According to a note on the back of the photo, this was one of two trophies he designed for the Maidstone Club.
Two years after Barclay’s solo Guild Hall show, he enlisted with the Naval Reserve as a war artist. In an unfortunate turn of events, he was on a naval vessel to illustrate sailors in action when it was torpedoed by enemy forces and destroyed. He was declared lost at sea in 1943.
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Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
