1894 Harper’s Bazar Original Issue, 3 November – Women and Golf, A. B. Frost Cover Illustration

This is an original issue of Harper's Bazar for 3 November 1894. Its cover, A Game of Golf – A Drive, by A. B. Frost, shows a woman golfer in the sporting dress of the period, caught mid-swing.

Harper & Brothers founded Harper's Bazar in New York in 1867. In the 1890s it was published weekly, edited by Margaret Sangster from 1889 to 1899, and combined fashion plates and patterns with fiction, essays and illustration.

Golf spread quickly in the United States in the early 1890s, with women playing from the start. The United States Golf Association was founded in December 1894, a few weeks after this issue, and the first US Women's Amateur Championship followed in 1895.

Frost, known for his sporting and rural scenes and for his drawings for Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, treats the subject as a moment of movement. The dress, the stance and the setting show how fashion and leisure met in women's sport of the period.

The issue is of interest to collectors of nineteenth-century magazines, of golf history and of American illustration. It records an early image of women's golf in the American press.