David Hockney

David Hockney was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on 9 July 1937, the fourth of five children of Kenneth Hockney, an accountant's clerk and conscientious objector in the Second World War, and Laura Hockney (nee Thompson), a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian. He attended Wellington Primary School and Bradford Grammar School before studying at Bradford College of Art, where fellow students included Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty.

At the Royal College of Art in London he met R. B. Kitaj and Frank Bowling and featured with Peter Blake in the New Contemporaries exhibition that announced British Pop art. He painted figurative and autobiographical pictures with a confident line and lettering, already signalling the independence that would mark his career.

Hockney came out as gay at 23 while still at the RCA, years before the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexual acts in England and Wales. Paintings such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), titled after Walt Whitman, and Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963) treated same-sex intimacy with unusual candour for the British art world of the time.

After moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s he embraced acrylic paint and the city's architecture of glass, lawns and private pools. A Bigger Splash (1967) and related pool paintings fixed a cool, sunstruck image of California that entered popular culture, while large double portraits explored friendship, desire and domestic stillness.

From 1968 he painted near life-size portraits of family, friends and partners. Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark appear in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. Peter Schlesinger, whom he met while teaching at UCLA in 1966, and later Gregory Evans, became recurring subjects. Over his lifetime he made more than 300 self-portraits.

Alongside painting he was a prolific printmaker. In the 1980s he assembled Polaroid and photographic 'joiners', multi-image collages that rejected single-point perspective and anticipated his later arguments about how cameras shape what we see.

Hockney designed for the stage as inventively as for the gallery wall. Early work included Ubu Roi at the Royal Court (1966). For Glyndebourne he designed The Rake's Progress (1975) and The Magic Flute (1978). At the Metropolitan Opera he created sets and costumes for the French triple bill Parade in 1980, including works by Satie, Poulenc and Ravel.

From the 1990s he returned more often to Yorkshire, at first to visit his mother Laura, who died in 1999. Encouraged by his friend Jonathan Silver, he began painting the local landscape from memory and then en plein air. Based for years in Bridlington, he produced large multi-canvas oils, culminating in Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), later given to Tate.

Hockney treated new tools as fresh drawing media. He used a Quantel Paintbox for the BBC series Painting with Light, learned digital workflows with his sister Margaret, and from 2009 made hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes on iPhone and iPad using Brushes and later Procreate, exhibiting luminous digital drawings worldwide.

Collectors chased his work for decades. The Splash sold for 2.6 million pounds in 2006 and 23.1 million pounds in 2020. Beverly Hills Housewife and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) set successive living-artist auction records in the late 2010s, briefly making him the most expensive living artist at auction.

He received the John Moores Painting Prize in 1967 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1989. Appointed a Companion of Honour in 1997 and elected a Royal Academician, he joined the Order of Merit in 2012. Major retrospectives, including Tate Britain's record-breaking 2017 show, cemented his public stature.

Hockney lived between Los Angeles, London, Paris and later Normandy as well as Yorkshire. Long relationships with Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans shaped both his life and his pictures; Evans later managed the David Hockney Studio. In his final years his partner was Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima. A lifelong heavy smoker, he defended the habit publicly even as health campaigns intensified.

Hockney died at home in London on 11 June 2026, aged 88. King Charles III called him a giant of art and a Yorkshireman through and through. Tracey Emin remembered a proud chain-smoking homosexual who changed perceptions of Britishness. Tate described an endlessly inventive artist whose loss to the art world was immense. His funeral was private, attended by Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima and his great-nephew Richard.

Hockney leaves a body of work that spans Pop figurative painting, photo-collage, opera design and digital drawing. Museums worldwide hold his pictures; Tate announced it would continue projects he had been preparing, including a major Tate Britain survey and a Turbine Hall installation drawn from his opera designs. His insistence on looking freshly remains the through-line of a career that never settled for one style.