On 11 June 2026, the world lost one of its most vivid colours. David Hockney, the great British artist whose swimming pools, double portraits and Yorkshire lanes became some of the most recognisable images of the last century, died at his London home aged 88.

In 2018, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s New York for US$90.3 million, briefly making him the most expensive living artist at auction. Yet that record was only one frame in a much larger picture.

From his rebellion at the Royal College of Art to his embrace of homosexual desire on canvas, from the pools and roads of California to the flowers, Yorkshire lanes and iPad drawings of his later years, Hockney spent his life painting what he loved and finding new ways to see.

David Hockney in his London studio

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) once made Hockney the most expensive living artist at auction

The Royal College Rebel

Born in 1937 in Bradford, in England’s industrial north, David Hockney was the fourth of five children in a family of modest means. His father worked as an accounts clerk, while his mother was a devout Methodist. Though money was tight, both parents encouraged his early artistic promise.

In 1959, Hockney enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London and quickly became a star student, if hardly an obedient one. The college still required diploma candidates to submit a set number of life paintings from the model; Hockney argued that the nudes on offer were uninspiring, and that great painters had always chosen sitters they were genuinely drawn to.

He eventually submitted Life Painting for a Diploma, which depicts a muscular male nude copied from the cover of the American bodybuilding magazine Physique Pictorial. To prove he was perfectly capable of anatomical precision, he paired it with a meticulously rendered skeleton study made during his first days at the college, mocking the very idea that nude painting could ever be truly “objective.”

Hockney also refused to write the final academic essay, insisting he should be assessed on his art alone. When warned that this could cost him his degree, he etched his own certificate into The Diploma instead. Aware of the talent it was fostering, the college ultimately blinked, awarding him his diploma and, with it, the coveted Gold Medal.

Life Painting for a Diploma (1962), 180 x 180 cm | Sold: £860,500, Sotheby's London, 2007

The Diploma (1962), etching, 40.5 x 28 cm | Sold: £20,000, Christie's London, 2012

Painting what he loved

At the Royal College, Hockney became close to his American classmate R.B. Kitaj, whose advice stayed with him: ignore everyone else and paint what you love.

The 1960s art world was moving on from Abstract Expressionism and swept up in the rise of Pop. Hockney was soon hailed as part of a new British Pop generation, but his subjects were often more personal. Years before homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain, he was already making works that spoke openly about his own desires.

In 1964, two years after leaving the RCA, Hockney flew to Los Angeles, chasing the sunlit world he had glimpsed in American physique magazines. 

What he found more than lived up to the fantasy: bright skies, swimming pools, palm trees, tanned bodies, wild parties, and a flamboyant gay scene. Leaving behind a greyer, more conservative Britain, Hockney found a world that felt made for him, and there began painting the pictures that would make his name.

Two Men in a Shower (1963), 152 x 152 cm | Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo

California (1965), 168 x 198.8 cm | Sold: £18,710,000, Christie's London, 2024

Splashes under the California sun

In Los Angeles, Hockney discovered nearly every house seemed to have a swimming pool, not as a rare luxury but as part of everyday life. They soon became one of his great subjects, giving him a way to explore one of painting's oldest problems: how to represent the movement and changing surface of water.

Out of these experiments came the three "splash" paintings, arguably the most famous images of his career. Each painting presents a pared-back scene: a modernist house, a flat blue pool, an empty diving board, and, at its centre, the burst of water left by a diver we never see. 

“I loved the idea, first of all, of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water, swirling things,” Hockney later explained. “And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds; it takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds. Everyone knows a splash can’t be frozen in time, so when you see it like that in a painting it’s even more striking than in a photograph.”

The three paintings share near‑identical compositions but differ in scale and detail. The largest and best known, A Bigger Splash (1967), measuring about 243 by 244 cm, is now in Tate Britain’s collection. The Splash, at 183 by 183 cm, sold at Sotheby’s London in 2020 for just over £23 million, reportedly from the collection of Hong Kong property tycoon Joseph Lau. The smallest, The Little Splash, remains in private hands and has never appeared on the open market.

The Splash (1966), 183 x 183 cm | Sold: £23,117,000, Sotheby's London, 2020

A Bigger Splash (1967), 242.5 x 243.9 cm | Tate Britain 

Hockney in Los Angeles in 1964

Between intimacy and distance: the double portraits

Beyond the pool, Hockney's other great subject is the double portrait. Painted on large horizontal canvases, they usually show sitters he knew well in carefully observed domestic interiors. Furniture, clothes, and décor suggest class, taste, and private life, while colour sets the mood. 

Often the sitters are couples or close acquaintances, yet there is rarely touch and only limited eye contact. What holds the paintings together is the tension between them. Through small shifts in posture and the way the room’s geometry links or separates them, Hockney suggests relationships that feel both affectionate and distant.

Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), 214 x 305 cm | Sold: £37,661,250, Christie's London, 2019

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), 212 x 303.5 cm | Sold: US$44,335,000, Christie's New York, 2025 

My Parents (1977), 182.9 x 182.9 cm | Tate Britain

Hockney made only seven of these double portraits. Four are now in museum collections; the others command the highest prices at auction. The most expensive is Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for US$90.3 million, then a record for a living artist. The buyer was reportedly Pierre Chen, chairman and founder of Taiwan’s Yageo.

The painting brings together two of Hockney’s defining themes: the swimming pool and the double portrait. On the terrace stands Peter Schlesinger, Hockney’s former lover and frequent muse. He looks down towards the pool with his eyes closed, while a swimmer, based on Hockney himself, glides beneath the surface. Painted after their breakup, the seemingly simple scene carries a deeper undercurrent of attachment and loss.

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), 213.5 x 305 cm | Sold: US$90,312,500, Christie's New York, 2018

Hockney and Peter Schlesinger

Hockney painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 

The road as landscape

In 1980, Hockney had moved to Nichols Canyon while continuing to work from a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. Driving between the two several times a day, he began to see the city differently.

He has often said he dislikes straight lines and grid-planned cities, calling New York a “perspective nightmare.” The Hollywood Hills offered quite the opposite: a labyrinth of “wiggly” roads where the view changes at every turn and the eye is never pinned to a single vanishing point.

Struck by the wild setting around him, he turned this daily routine into two brightly coloured canvases: Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, his largest painting, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Nichols Canyon, which set a record price for a Hockney landscape when it sold for US$41 million at Phillips New York in 2020.

In Nichols Canyon, Hockney compresses the climb, turns and shifting views of an entire drive into a single monumental image. Looking at the painting becomes a way of travelling through it: as he suggested, the viewer’s eye should move around the canvas at roughly the same speed as a car moving along the road.

Nichols Canyon (1980), 213.4 x 152.4 cm | Sold: US$41,067,500, Phillips New York, 2020

Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), 218.4 x 617.2 cm | Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Reversing perspective

Since the Renaissance, Western painting has largely relied on single-point perspective: a fixed viewpoint, lines converging on a vanishing point, and objects shrinking as they recede. For centuries, this way of seeing was treated almost as second nature.

Hockney has spent much of his career questioning that tradition. He was drawn in particular to Chinese scroll painting, where there is no single fixed viewpoint and the focus shifts as the viewer moves along the image. For him, this felt closer to everyday looking than the locked view of classical Western painting.

Reverse perspective became one response. Instead of placing the vanishing point inside the picture, Hockney pushed it behind the viewer, or allowed several viewpoints to operate at once. Photography offered a practical way to test the idea. In his photographic collages, many images taken from slightly different positions and moments are joined into one work. Each photograph may record a single instant, but together they create a picture with multiple viewpoints and a sense of moving time.

Around 2017, Hockney took this thinking in a new direction with a series of irregular hexagonal canvases made in the lead-up to his major travelling retrospective. By cutting the lower corners of a rectangle, he created a shape that allowed the image to bend beyond the usual frame. "Someone said I was cutting corners, but actually, I've added two... Why didn't I think of this twenty years ago?" he quipped.

Hockney released the film A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China with Philip Haas in 1988, where he narrates his way through a Chinese scroll

The Desk, July 1st (1984), photographic collage, 114 x 119.1 cm | Sold: US$87,500, Phillips New York, 2014

Nichols Canyon III (2017), 121.9 x 243.8 cm | Sold: HK$94,800,000, Christie's Hong Kong, 2022

Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico from The Brass Tacks Triptych (2017), 121.9 x 243.8 cm | Exhibited in Florence in 2025

In dialogue with the masters

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Hockney was absorbed in photography, stage design, printmaking and digital experiments. That changed in the mid‑1990s, when exhibitions of Monet, Van Gogh, and Vermeer in Chicago and The Hague reignited his interest in painting.

Back in his Los Angeles studio, Hockney set his canvases to catch the fall of daylight and began a new series of around 25 flower still lifes. Rich in colour and finely balanced in light and shade, the works turn a traditional subject into a conversation across time with the artists who had just inspired him.

One of the two largest paintings in the series, 30 Sunflowers, sold for HK$114 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2020. It pays tribute to Van Gogh, reworking the famous motif with heightened naturalism and vivid colour. To make the petals and vase glow, Hockney adapted Vermeer’s technique of layering yellow and blue beneath the surface colour. A deep red tablecloth drops like an opera curtain, nodding to his long-standing love of stage design.

Among the upright, full blooms are drooping heads and fallen stems, echoing the European still-life tradition that links flowers to the passage of time. Many of Hockney's flower paintings were also made for friends who were ill, painted as a kind of get-well card.

30 Sunflowers (1996), 182.9 x 182.9 cm | Sold: HK$114,827,000, Sotheby's Hong Kong, 2020

Gladioli with Two Oranges (1996), 65.4 x 81.2 cm | Sold: £4,219,500, Sotheby's London, 2021

Homecoming and the iPad

From the mid-1990s, Hockney began returning regularly to England to spend time with his ageing mother. Those visits drew his attention back to the landscape of his native Yorkshire: fields, lanes, hills, hedgerows and country roads – scenery far removed from the bright glamour of California.

Yet instead of the muted greys often associated with the English countryside, he flooded these views with high-saturation colour and bold contrasts that slice up pictorial space and deepen distance. Winding roads and paths often run from the foreground into the distance, continuing his interest in reverse perspective and in painting as an experience of moving through time.

Hockney has also been unusually open to new technology. He used fax machines in the 1980s, experimented with computer drawing in the 1990s, and later embraced the iPad as a serious artistic tool.

He designed his stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey on an iPad, before the design was translated into glass by specialist makers. Many of his iPad landscapes of England have also been issued as prints, becoming especially popular at auction.

Garrowby Hill (1998), 152 x 193 cm | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Winter Timber (2009), 274.3 x 609.6 cm | Sold: US$23,290,000, Christie's New York, 2022

The Queen Elizabeth II window at Westminster Abbey

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) - 2 January, iPad drawing printed in colours on wove paper, 139.7 x 105.4 cm | Sold: £281,600, Sotheby's London, 2026

The world’s most famous pro-smoking artist

Across Hockney’s life, two habits have never wavered: making art and smoking. He started at ten, favours Camel and Davidoff, and has long been not just a devoted smoker but an unusually outspoken critic of anti‑smoking campaigns.

In newspaper articles and interviews, he has argued that smoking helps his mental wellbeing and called anti-smokers “curtain-sniffers.” Public smoking bans, which he described as “fascist” measures, stripped citizens of everyday freedoms; smokers, he said, paid heavy tobacco taxes and so helped fund the very healthcare systems that lecture them.

On one occasion he turned up at a Labour Party meeting on smoking policy, holding a sign reading “Death awaits you even if you do not smoke” while calmly lighting up. In 2019, he left Los Angeles for France, partly in response to tightening California regulations that made it harder for him to smoke where he lived and worked.

Perhaps the most considerate honour he received in Britain came in 2007, when Tate hosted a dinner for his 70th birthday. The gallery reportedly made a small concession after the meal: the smoke detectors would be switched off for ten minutes, so that the guest of honour could enjoy a cigarette in peace.

Hockney turned up at a Labour Party conference on smoking policy in 2005

Self portrait III, 20 March 2012, iPad drawing printed on paper, 94.0 x 71.0 cm | National Gallery of Victoria, Australia