Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns born 15 May 1930

Jasper Johns is a contemporary American artist best known for painting and printmaking and associated with the Pop Art and Neo-Dada movements.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at Parsons School of Design in 1949. While in New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he had a artistic and sexual relationship, as well as Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. United by friendship and shared homosexuality they were to have a profound effect on the creative arts in 1950s New York - helping to define post-modernism.

In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Robert Rauschenberg's studio.

Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.

Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects. Johns neutralised the subject, so that something like pure paint - painted surface - could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface - in Andy Warhol's silkscreens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances - could suffice.

In contrast to the concept of macho 'artist hero' as ascribed to Abstract Expressionist figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose paintings are fully indexical (that is, standing effectively as an all-over canvas signature), Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seem preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols, painted indexically in what some have interpreted as a rebuttal of the hallowed individuality of the Abstract Expressionists. There is also the issue of symbols existing outside of any referential context; Johns' flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.

Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favoured by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire.

Above, Jasper Johns, 1997 by Chuck Close

Léon Bakst

Léon Bakst born 10 May 1866 (d. 1924)

Léon Nikolayevich Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume-designer who revolutionised the arts he worked in.

Léon Bakst was born as Lev (Leib) Rosenberg in Grodno (currently Belarus) in a middle-class Jewish family. After graduating from gymnasium (school), he studied at St Petersburg Academy of Arts as a non-credit student, working part-time as a book illustrator.

On his first exhibition (1889) he took the name of Bakst based on his maternal grandmother's family name, Baxter -  Rosenburg was considered too Jewish and not good for business. At the beginning of the 1890s he exhibited his works with the Society of Watercolourists. During 1893-1897 he lived in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian while still visiting St Petersburg often. After the mid-1890s he became a member of the circle of writers and artists formed by Sergei Diaghilev and Alexandre Benois, which later became the Mir Iskusstva art movement.

In 1899, he co-founded with Sergei Diaghilev the influential periodical World of Art. His graphics for the World of Art magazine brought him fame.

He continued easel painting as well producing portraits of Filipp Malyavin (1899), Vasily Rozanov (1901), Andrei Bely (1905) [pictured left], Zinaida Gippius (1906). He also worked as an art teacher for children of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. In 1902 he took a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to paint Meeting of Russian sailors in Paris.

In 1898 he showed his works in the Diaghilev-organised First exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists; in World of Art exhibitions, as well as the Secession in Munich, exhibitions of the Union of Russian Artists, etc.

After the end of the decade of the 1900s, Bakst worked mostly as a stage-designer. Bakst designed settings for Greek tragedies, and in 1908 made a name as a stage and costume designer for Diaghilev with the Ballets Russes (Cleopatra 1909, Shakherezada 1910, Carnaval 1910, Narcissus 1911, Daphnis et Chloé 1912). For this work, Bakst was to make a massive contribution in changing the visual vocabulary of theatre and dance.

During his visits to St Petersburg he taught in Zvantseva's school. One of his students was Marc Chagall (1908-1910).

In 1914 Bakst was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

In 1918 he severed  his ties with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. He died in 1924 in Paris from lung problems.

Top right: Self-portrait by Leon Bakst. Bottom left: Portrait of Leon Bakst by Amadeo Modigliani


Design by Léon Bakst for Phedre and Theseus in 1923

Patrick Procktor

Patrick Proctor born 12 March 1936 (d. 2003)

Patrick Procktor RA was a prominent English artist of the late 20th century.

Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin, the younger of two sons of an oil company accountant, but moved to London when his father died in 1940. From the age of 10, he attended Highgate School – where his teachers included landscape painter Kyffin Williams – intending to read classics at university. However, his mother's income was insufficient to fund his further education and after a period working with a north London builders' merchants 18-year-old Procktor was conscripted into the Royal Navy where, during his National Service, he learned to speak Russian.

Subsequently, while working as a Russian interpreter with the British Council, Procktor began to paint and draw in his spare time, and was accepted by the Slade School of Fine Art in 1958. There he was influenced by artists including William Coldstream and Keith Vaughan, developing a dark, figurative painting style.

In 1962 he became a professional artist and had his first show at the Redfern Gallery in London's Cork Street in 1963 – a great commercial success that helped confirm his reputation among a wider artistic circle including the theatre and music (he won numerous commissions for pop record sleeves). A year later, Procktor was featured in Bryan Robertson's New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery – a show that also raised the profile of fellow artists David Hockney, Bridget Riley and John Hoyland.

Procktor's work, primarily in oils, acrylics and watercolour, drew on pop art influences, but were also influenced by his travels (he visited Italy, Greece, India, China and Japan, among other places). He was also adept at printmaking, producing a sequence to illustrate a new 1976 edition of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1984 he was commissioned to paint a reredos for the St John the Baptist's Chapel in Chichester Cathedral.

Procktor lived in Manchester Street, Marylebone, central London (in a flat formerly occupied by William Coldstream), where he socialised with, among others, Derek Jarman, Francis Bacon, and Cecil Beaton (several of Beaton's photographs of Procktor are in the National Portrait Gallery; Procktor's own 1967 pen and ink drawing of Joe Orton is also in the Gallery's collection).

Despite his homosexual leanings, in 1973 Procktor married a widow neighbour and restaurateur Kirsten Benson. She sold her restaurant (Odin's) to Peter Langan, and Procktor, Hockney, Bacon and Lucien Freud all provided paintings to hang on the walls of Odin's and Langan's Brasserie in return for hospitality.

Procktor was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1996 and died seven years later, aged 67.

On a personal note, his older brother Richard Procktor was my headmaster and history teacher.

Jared French

Jared French born 4 February 1905 (d. 1988)

Jared French was a painter who specialised in the ancient medium of egg tempera. He was one of the masters of Magic Realism, part of a circle of friends and colleagues who all painted surreal imagery in egg tempera. Others include George Tooker and Paul Cadmus.

Jared French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. He met and befriended Paul Cadmus in New York City, became his lover and persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for 'serious painting'. In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, another artist. For the next eight years the Cadmuses and Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PAJAMA (Paul, Jared, and Margaret). French painted numerous murals for the WPA.

PaJaMa: George Tooker, Jared French and Monroe Wheeler in Provincetown, 1947

During the 1930s and 1940s, French was a member of the New York circle that included such gay literary and artistic figures as George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, George Tooker, Glenway Westcott and Monroe Wheeler.

Jared French's early paintings are eerie, colorful tableaux of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues. His later work shows 'a kind of classical biomorphism', strange, colourful, suggestive organic forms.

Towards the end of his career his work fell out of favour with critics.

French died in Rome in 1988, where he had lived for 20 years, aged 82.



See more of Jared French's paintings here

Two photos at the top are Jared French by George Platt Lynes in 1938.

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent born 12 January 1856 (d. 1925)

John Singer Sargent was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents.

Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.

In the early 1880s Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly full-length portrayals of women: Madame Edouard Pailleron in 1880, Madame Ramón Subercaseaux in 1881, and Lady with the Rose, 1882. Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent's great influences.

Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits. Many of his most important works are in museums in the US. Sargent made numerous visits to the United States in the last decade of his life, including a stay of two full years from 1915-1917.

In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practised his own form of Realism, which brilliantly referenced Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless ability to create portraits worthy of the masters but in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity. Still, during his life his work engendered critical responses from some of his colleagues, who regarded his work as highly competent but overly traditional. By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe. Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the 1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking aesthetic quality.

Despite a long period of critical disfavour, Sargent's popularity has increased steadily since the 1960s, and Sargent has been the subject of recent large-scale exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, and a 1999 'blockbuster' travelling show that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the National Gallery, London.

Sargent was extremely private regarding his personal life, although the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after his death that Sargent's sex life 'was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.' The truth of this may never be established. Some scholars have also suggested that Sargent was homosexual. He had personal associations with Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. His male nudes reveal complex and well-considered artistic sensibilities about the male physique and male sensuality. However, there were many friendships with women, as well, and a similar sensualism informs his female portrait and figure studies - he was simply a very gifted painter. His career doesn't show the same kind of bias in subject matter as Henry Scott Tuke, for example. The likelihood of an affair with Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose, is accepted by Sargent scholars.

John Singer Sargent is interred in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.

Portrait of Madame X (1884) Metropolitan Museum of Art



Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892) National Galleries of Scotland



Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer (1901) Tate Gallery



Dr Pozzi at Home (1881) Hammer Museum



John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery

Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley born 4 January 1877 (d. 1943)

Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist of the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA, where his English parents had settled. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892. He was born Edmund Hartley, but chose to take on his step-mother's maiden name, Marsden, as his first name.

At the age of 22, Hartley moved to New York City, where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. A great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hartley would visit Ryder's studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' 291 Gallery Group. Hartley had his first major exhibition at the 291 Gallery in 1909 and another in 1912. He was in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Léger, Ezra Pound, Arnold Ronnebeck among many others.

Hartley painted Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, his friend Arnold Ronnebeck's cousin and a Prussian lieutenant of whom he became enamored before von Freyburg's death in World War I. The painting makes distinctive use of military symbols - including von Freyburg's initials - to suggest a human form. There has been much controversy over Hartley's adoption of Germany military symbolism in his art of this period - and of the nature of his relationship with Karl von Freyburg.

Marsden Hartley travelled throughout the USA and Europe in the early years of the 20th century. Considered an early modernist, Hartley was a nomadic painter for much of his life. He painted from Maine to Massachusetts, in New Mexico, California, New York and Western Europe. Finally, after spending many years away from his native state, he returned to Maine toward the end of his life. He wanted to become 'the painter of Maine' and depict American life at a local level. In this way, he is a member of the regionalists, a group of artists from the early to mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly 'American art'.

In addition to being considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20th century, Hartley also wrote poems, essays, and stories.

Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy is a story based on two periods he spent in 1935 and 1936 with the Mason family in the Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, fishing community of East Point Island. Hartley, then in his late 50s, found there both an innocent, unrestrained love and the sense of family he had been seeking since his unhappy childhood in Maine. The impact of this experience lasted until his death in 1943 and helped widen the scope of his mature works, which included numerous portrayals of the Masons.

He wrote of the Masons, 'Five magnificent chapters out of an amazing, human book, these beautiful human beings, loving, tender, strong, courageous, dutiful, kind, so like the salt of the sea, the grit of the earth, the sheer face of the cliff.' In Cleophas and His Own, written in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1936 and re-printed in Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia, Hartley expresses his immense grief at the tragic drowning of the Mason sons. The independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras has created a feature film Cleophas and His Own, released in 2005, which uses a personal testament by Hartley as its screenplay.

Pavel Tchelitchew

Pavel Tchelitchew born 21 September 1898 (d. 1957)

Pavel Tchelitchew was a Russian-born surrealist painter.

Tchelitchew was born near Moscow on the estate of his aristocratic family. He was educated by a series of French, German, and English governesses, who encouraged his interest in the arts.

His father, a follower of Tolstoyian principles, supported his desire to become a painter. In spite of his father's liberal views, however, the family was expelled from its property in 1918 following the revolution of 1917.

Tchelitchew joined the White army, and the family fled to Kiev, which was not yet under Communist control. While in Kiev he continued his studies and produced his first theatre designs.

By 1920 he was in Odessa, escaping the advancing Red armies. He went on to Berlin via Istanbul. There he met Allen Tanner, an American pianist, and became his lover. In 1923 they moved to Paris and Tchelitchew began painting portraits of the avant-garde and homosexual elite. His work was much admired and bought by Gertrude Stein.

In addition to becoming an accomplished painter, he also became one of the most innovative stage designers of the period and designed ballets for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in Paris.

His first US show was of his drawings, along with other artists, at the newly-opened Museum of Modern Art in 1930.

In 1934, he moved from Paris to New York City with his then partner, writer Charles Henri Ford. He and Ford were at the centre of a social world of wealthy, artistic homosexuals, such as Lincoln Kirstein, for whom he also designed ballets. He also designed for Balanchine's fledgling American Ballet.

From 1940 to 1947, he provided illustrations for the Surrealist magazine View, edited by Ford and writer and film critic Parker Tyler.

Tchelitchew's critical reputation declined in the 1950s and 1960s along with the decline of interest in figurative art.

In 1952 Tchelitchew became a US citizen, but shortly afterwards moved to Frascati, Italy. He suffered a heart attack in 1956 and died on July 31, 1957 in Rome, with Ford by his bedside.

[Centre picture: Charles Henri Ford reads as Tchelitchew paints Peter Watson's portrait]

Keith Vaughan

Keith Vaughan born 23 August 1912 (d. 1977)

John Keith Vaughan was an English painter.

After attending Christ's Hospital school, he worked in an advertising agency until the war, when as a conscientious objector he joined the St John's Ambulance. In 1941 he was conscripted into the Pioneer Corps. Vaughan was self-taught as an artist. His first exhibitions took place during the war.

Also during the war Vaughan formed friendships with the painters Graham Sutherland and John Minton, with whom after demobilisation in 1946 he shared premises. Through these contacts he formed part of the Neo-Romantic circle of the immediate post-war period. However, Vaughan rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style which moved him away from the Neo-Romantics. Concentrating on studies of male figures, his works became increasingly more abstract with time.

From 1946 to 1948 he taught at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. During this time a penniless painting student, Ramsey McClure, turned up at his doorstep, and they became partners and lived together for 30 years.

Keith Vaughan met many other gay figures from art and literature including Christopher Isherwood, (see diaries for 1947 and 1948), and E M Forster.

Keith Vaughan taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1948 to 1957. He painted the Theseus mural decoration in the Festival of Britain Dome of Discovery in 1951.

From 1954 he taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he taught David Hockney. He also travelled extensively and was visiting resident artist at Iowa State University during 1959. In 1962 a retrospective of his work was held at Whitechapel Art Gallery with an Arts Council tour. In 1964 he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal College of Art. In 1965 he was awarded the CBE.

Vaughan is also known for his journals, selections from which were published in 1966 and more extensively in 1989, after his death. A gay man troubled by his sexuality, and much of what is known about him is through those journals. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1975 and committed suicide in 1977, recording his last moments in his diary as the drugs overdose took effect.


Keith Vaughan at GLBTQ Encyclopedia

Howard Hodgkin

Sir Howard Hodgkin born 6 August 1932

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin is a British painter and printmaker.

Howard Hodgkin was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset. He then studied at the Camberwell Art School and later at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where Edward Piper studied drawing under him. His first solo show was in London in 1962. His early paintings tend to be made up of hard-edged curved forms in a limited number of colours. Around the beginning of the 1970s, his style became more spontaneous, with vaguely recognisable shapes presented in bright colours and bold forms. His works might be called 'semi-abstract', and are often compared to Henri Matisse.

Hodgkin's paintings often seek to convey memories of encounters with friends and frequently carry titles alluding to specific places and events such as Dinner at West Hill (1966) and Goodbye to the Bay of Naples (1980–82). Hodgkin himself has said that he paints 'representational pictures of emotional situations'.

His prints are hand-painted etchings and he has worked with the same master printer (Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop) and print publisher (Alan Cristea Gallery) for the last 25 years.

Despite their apparent spontaneity and usually small scale, many of Hodgkin's paintings take years to complete, with him returning to a work after a wait and then changing it or adding to it. He often paints over the frames of his pictures, emphasising the idea of the painting as an object. Several of his works are on wooden items, such as bread-boards or the tops of old tables, rather than canvas. A number of his works not shown in frames are surrounded by rectangles of simple colour.

In 1984, Hodgkin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, in 1985 he won the Turner Prize, and in 1992 he was knighted. In 2003 he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honour. A major exhibition of his work was held at Tate Britain, London, in 2006. Also in 2006 The Independent declared him one of the 100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain.

George Tooker

George Tooker born 5 August 1920

George Clair Tooker, Jr. is one of Magic Realism's most prominent visual artists. He was raised by his Anglo/French-American father George Clair Tooker and English/Spanish-Cuban mother Angela Montejo Roura in Brooklyn Heights and Bellport, New York.

Tooker longed to go to art school rather than college, but ultimately abided by his parents wishes and majored in English literature at Harvard University, while still devoting much of his time to painting. In 1942, he graduated from college and then entered the Marine Corps but was discharged due to ill-health.

In 1943 he began studying at the Art Students League of New York. Reginald Marsh - who was his mentor - and Kenneth Hayes Miller were two of his teachers at the ASL. Early in his career Tooker was often compared with other painters such as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and especially his friends, the other Magic Realists, Jared French and Paul Cadmus. All three were championed by Lincoln Kirstein, the influential collector and impresario.

Working within the then-revitalised tradition of egg tempera, Tooker addressed affecting issues of modern-day alienation with subtly eerie and often visually literal depictions of social withdrawal and isolation. Subway (1950; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) [pictured below] and Government Bureau (1956; Metropolitan Museum of Art) [pictured bottom] are two of his best-known paintings.



Although he was raised in a religious (Episcopalian) family he later converted to Catholicism, after the death of his life partner, the artist William Christopher. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and has lived in rural Vermont since the late-1950s, originally moving there with Christopher, where he continues to paint..

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins born 24 July 1844 (d. 1916)

Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins was a painter, sculptor, photographer and fine arts teacher. He is associated with realism, and is often regarded as the father of American painting.

Raised and educated in Philadelphia, he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and then spent several years studying in Paris and Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, and in 1882 became its director. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, notably his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. Though there were tensions between him and the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present. The majority of Eakins's students liked his teaching methods and encouraged him to continue teaching them at Philadelphia's Art Students League.

Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture - usually of friends and family, and done with a realistic but psychological approach, rather than pure representation.

In the 1880s, Eakins became aware of the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and enthusiastically embraced photography, making nude motion studies of his own and even developing a method of early motion capture. Photography also became an influence on his painting, although his photographs were then regarded as source material and a personal interest and not as art in themselves.

Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but has come to be regarded as one of the most influential and important figures in American painting. His work has also been significant for its homoeroticism, and his teaching methods, for his insistence on teaching men and women together and in the same way, which was ground breaking and controversial at the time.

Eakins was married and his sexuality remains a matter of dispute, but his body of nude work, his close friendship with Walt Whitman and his belief that a naked woman was the most beautiful form in nature - 'except a naked man', give some clues.

Probably Eakins' best known work The Swimming Hole (1884-5)

The Wrestlers (1889)

Photographic motion study (1884 or 5)

David Hockney

David Hockney born 9 July 1937

Born and educated in Bradford, Yorkshire, David Hockney studied at Bradford College of Art and the London College of Art, where with his contemporary, Peter Blake, he was one of the most significant stars of British Pop Art. In 1963, a visit to New York brought him into contact with Andy Warhol.

He has produced a series of paintings, portraits - mostly of his friends - prints, lithographs, photocollages, commissions and theatrical stage designs. He has also experimented with using computers and other technology to create art. Much of his work is representative of his life in his adopted home of California, especially his landscapes and pool pictures.

The film A Bigger Splash (1974) about Hockney and named after one of his most famous paintings, creates the definitive image of this distinctive Yorkshireman and his life and work up to that point.

Hockney, who has always been openly gay, is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century and his best canvases now sell for millions. The distinctive style of his work - in whatever form it takes - and his trademark mop of blonde - now white - hair and round spectacles identify him as a unique and popular cultural figure.

In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London organised one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work. The collection consisted of his earliest self portraits up to his latest work completed in 2005. The exhibition proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery's history, and Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works.

His most recent work has seen Hockney undertaking a series of large-scale landscapes of his native Yorkshire.