Suzanne Lenglen & Frank Fisher — Original Snapshot Photographs, c.1920s
A pair of PSA/DNA Type I authenticated original photographs of the greatest female tennis player of the pre-war era, pictured courtside with New Zealand’s Boer War veteran turned international tennis champion.
La Divine
In the summer of 1919, a twenty-year-old Frenchwoman walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon and scandalised the entire sporting establishment.
It wasn’t her tennis that caused the uproar — not initially, at least. It was what she was wearing. While her opponent, the forty-year-old seven-time champion Dorothea Lambert Chambers, took the court in the customary ankle-length skirt, high-necked blouse, and corset, Suzanne Lenglen appeared in a short-sleeved, calf-length pleated dress with no petticoat, no corset, and her silk stockings rolled above the knee. Parts of the press called her outfit “indecent.”
She then won the championship.
It was the beginning of the most dominant reign in the history of women’s tennis — and, arguably, the moment modern women’s sport began.
Over the next seven years, Suzanne Lenglen lost one match. One. Between 1919 and 1926, she compiled a record of 341 victories against just seven defeats, with a longest winning streak of 181 consecutive matches. She won six Wimbledon singles titles, six French Championships, and Olympic gold in both singles and mixed doubles at Antwerp in 1920. The French press called her La Divine — The Goddess. Ernest Hemingway referenced her in The Sun Also Rises. By the mid-1920s, she was more famous than any film star or politician in Europe.
But Lenglen’s significance extends far beyond the record books. She was the first female athlete to become a global celebrity, and the first to understand — instinctively, long before the concept had a name — what it meant to be a brand. She brought men’s-level aggression and athleticism to the women’s game, playing with a physical intensity that no woman had dared show before. And she used fashion as a deliberate instrument of liberation, working with the couturier Jean Patou to design outfits that prioritised movement and self-expression over propriety. The signature bandeau headband, the sleeveless dresses, the “Lenglen shoe” — these were not accidents. They were statements. And millions of young women in the 1920s copied every one of them.
When Queen Mary presented Lenglen with a medal at Wimbledon’s fiftieth anniversary in 1926, it was the young tennis player, not the monarch, who was the global fashion icon.
The soldier at the net
Standing beside Lenglen in these photographs, racquet in hand, flat cap shading his eyes from the sun, is a man whose life reads like a novel from a different century — because, in many ways, it was.
Francis “Frank” Marion Bates Fisher was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1877 — the son of George Fisher, a Member of Parliament and Mayor of Wellington. In 1902, at the age of twenty-four, he served as a captain in the 10th New Zealand Contingent during the Boer War in South Africa. On returning home, he entered politics himself, representing Wellington Central in the New Zealand House of Representatives for nearly a decade.
He was also a formidable tennis player. In 1906, Fisher reached the final of the Australasian Open, losing to the great Anthony Wilding — the New Zealander who would go on to win four consecutive Wimbledon titles before being killed at the Battle of Aubers Ridge in 1915. Fisher won multiple New Zealand doubles and mixed doubles championships, and after the war he campaigned on the international circuit with remarkable success for a man now in his forties. In 1919 he reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in doubles. In 1920 — the year these photographs are believed to have been taken — he won the World Covered Court Championships in mixed doubles with Irene Peacock, and competed at Wimbledon again. He returned to Wimbledon in 1922 and 1923.
Fisher’s path and Lenglen’s crossed repeatedly on the international tournament circuit of the early 1920s. Both were at Wimbledon in 1920. Both were at the World Covered Court Championships in the same year. These photographs, with their easy, courtside intimacy, suggest something more than a passing acquaintance between two competitors. They suggest the shared world of elite inter-war tennis — a world that was tiny, aristocratic, international, and is now almost entirely lost to us.
The photographs
These are two original snapshot photographs, both authenticated and encapsulated by PSA/DNA as Type I originals dating to c.1920s.
The first (PSA/DNA certification 85439701) shows Lenglen and Fisher standing together at the net, both in whites. Lenglen wears a cloche hat and a pleated skirt that falls just below the knee — the silhouette she made famous. Fisher stands close beside her in a flat cap, racquet held loosely at his side. There is an informality to the image — a warmth between the two subjects — that no posed press photograph could replicate. The chain-link fencing and simple courtside setting suggest a club environment rather than a championship venue, adding to the private, unguarded quality of the moment.
The second photograph (PSA/DNA certification 85439916) is more candid still. Fisher stands in the foreground, smiling broadly, racquet in both hands, with Lenglen visible behind him and to the right. A third figure, partially cropped, appears to the left. The photographer’s own shadow falls across the court in the lower portion of the image — a detail that reinforces the snapshot character of the photograph and places the viewer almost physically at the scene.
The reverse of the second photograph carries a pencilled notation — “1 of 1” — suggesting cataloguing from a personal album or private collection.
Type I photographs are contemporary images produced at or near the time of the event depicted. Unlike later reprints, wire service redistributions, or modern reproductions, they are primary documents — made in the moment, on photographic paper of the period. For original snapshots of this nature, as opposed to press photographs produced in multiple copies for editorial distribution, the term “1 of 1” takes on a very literal meaning. These are, in all probability, unique surviving images.
What these photographs capture
The early 1920s were Lenglen’s imperial years. Between 1919 and 1923, she won five consecutive Wimbledon singles titles, three Wimbledon triple crowns (singles, doubles, and mixed doubles in the same year), and Olympic gold. Her popularity was so intense that Wimbledon was forced to move to its current, larger venue in part to accommodate the crowds who came to watch her play.
These photographs date from that period — a moment when Lenglen was, by any reasonable measure, the most famous female athlete on earth. Yet the images themselves are entirely absent of ceremony. There are no press photographers jostling for position, no officials, no formality. This is Lenglen off-duty, relaxed, smiling beside a fellow competitor at what appears to be an informal club setting. That contrast — between the scale of her public celebrity and the quiet, personal nature of these images — is precisely what makes them so valuable as historical documents.
Fisher’s presence adds a dimension that a solo portrait of Lenglen could not. Here was a man who had fought in the Boer War, sat in the New Zealand Parliament, and competed against Anthony Wilding — three experiences that between them span the entire arc of the Edwardian and inter-war world. That he appears here, at ease beside the most famous sportswoman of the age, tells us something about the intimate, interconnected nature of international tennis in this period. It was a world small enough that a New Zealand politician-soldier-sportsman and a French goddess of the court could stand together at a net and have their photograph taken by a friend.
Why these photographs matter
Original Type I photographs of Suzanne Lenglen are scarce in any form. Press photographs surface occasionally, but original snapshots — private, informal, unposed — are of a different order of rarity entirely. Press images were produced in multiples and distributed to newsrooms. Snapshots, by their nature, exist in single copies or very small numbers. The “1 of 1” notation on the reverse of the second photograph underscores this point.
To hold a pair of authenticated original photographs showing Lenglen in an informal, candid setting — alongside a figure whose own biography encompasses the Boer War, the New Zealand Parliament, and the international tennis circuit — is to hold something that connects directly and tangibly to a world that has otherwise vanished.
Lenglen died in 1938 at the age of thirty-nine, of leukaemia. She had retired from competition twelve years earlier, but her influence endured. The second show court at Roland Garros — the home of the French Open — bears her name. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1978. In 2012, the Tennis Channel ranked her the greatest women’s player of the amateur era. And every time a female athlete uses fashion, personality, and sheer force of will to transcend her sport, she is walking in Lenglen’s footsteps — whether she knows it or not.
These two small photographs, taken on a sunny afternoon a century ago, are among the few surviving private images of the woman who started all of that.
Availability
These photographs form part of the CardHawk Vault and are offered as a pair. Selected items from the Vault are available for acquisition, with ownership and transactions handled separately from the archival presentation.
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