🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of David Hockney

Art

David Hockney

1937–2026 · British

Pop Art

David Hockney, from Bradford, was one of the most popular and influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. A key figure of 1960s Pop Art, he is best known for sunlit Californian swimming-pool paintings and double portraits, and later for vast, vividly coloured Yorkshire landscapes, photocollages and iPad drawings.

How to spot them

  • ▸Flat, bright acrylic scenes of Los Angeles: turquoise swimming pools with rippling wavy lines, palm trees, modernist houses, cloudless blue skies
  • ▸Calm, frontal double portraits of couples or friends in clean interiors, often with a window between them
  • ▸Later work: huge multi-canvas Yorkshire landscapes of trees and country lanes in hot, non-naturalistic colours (purples, oranges, lime greens)
  • ▸Photographic "joiners" — collages of many overlapping Polaroids or prints — and colourful iPad drawings

Key works

Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966)

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Rear view of a naked young man (Peter Schlesinger) climbing out of a pool in front of a flat modernist house

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

A Bigger Splash (1967)

Tate Britain, London

A white splash erupts from a blue pool below an empty diving board, a low pink-and-glass house and two palm trees; no figure visible

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71)

Tate Britain, London

Designers Ossie Clark (seated, white cat on his knee) and Celia Birtwell (standing) either side of an open window

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972)

Private collection

A man in a pink jacket stands at a pool's edge gazing at a swimmer underwater; sold for $90.3 million in 2018

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007)

Tate, London

His largest painting, made of 50 canvases: a wintry copse of bare sycamores beside a building in East Yorkshire

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937; died in June 2026, aged 88
  • •Studied at Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where he emerged in the early 1960s alongside the Pop artists
  • •Moved to Los Angeles in 1964, where the light, pools and lifestyle transformed his painting
  • •The cat in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is actually Blanche — Percy was another of the couple's cats
  • •Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) set a record for a living artist at auction in 2018
  • •Appointed to the Order of Merit in 2012; also a Companion of Honour
  • •Designed the Queen's Window, a stained-glass window in Westminster Abbey unveiled in 2018
  • •His 2012 Royal Academy exhibition "A Bigger Picture" showed huge Yorkshire landscapes and iPad drawings

Drill it — 10 cards

1 / 10new card

Sources