The Yorkshire genius who loathed Blair and Brown, loved sex, drugs and smoking, and created magic until his final breath

Published: 12:41, 12 June 2026 | Updated: 12:54, 12 June 2026 Few artists would turn down the honour of painting a reigning monarch but David Hockney did just that, declining several requests to capture the late Queen’s likeness because, he said, he only painted people he knew well. In Hockney’s view, fellow artist Lucian Freud should also have steered clear of the royal commission, the small oil he produced of the Queen in 2001 being no more than ‘OK’. ‘When you look at the Queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous,’ he said. ‘It’s very beautiful skin. Well, he didn’t get that at all.’ As this suggests, Hockney was never afraid to speak his mind, particularly when it came to what he perceived as the overbearing nanny state, exemplified in his opinion by the ban on smoking in public places introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 2007. He loathed ‘the f****** Blairs’ and Deputy PM Gordon Brown, ‘a dreary aesthetic Calvinistic prig. If he came to my house, I’d kick him in the f****** balls’. Rarely seen without a cigarette between his lips, Hockney pointed out that artists like Picasso, Matisse and Turner were all life-long smokers and claimed that inhaling was part of his creative process. Not while actually painting, because he needed his hands free, but in the moments in between. The late David Hockney was rarely seen without a cigarette, and often pointed out that great artists like Picasso, Matisse and Turner were all life-long smokers too Hockney turned down several opportunities to paint Queen Elizabeth II, because he said he only painted people he knew well. (Pictured receiving his OBE at Buckingham Palace in 2012) Hockney, who has died at the age of 88, became our best-known and best-loved living artist with an impressive career that spanned seven decades ‘When I stop and look at what I’ve done, the first thing I do is light up,’ he said. Puffing defiantly away until the end of his life, Hockney, who has died at the age of 88, became our best-known and best-loved living artist with a career which spanned seven decades. Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, stage design, and, later, iPad and digital works… he conquered them all with subjects ranging from the sun-drenched Californian scenes which first made him famous to his more recent depictions of his native Yorkshire in vast, immersive canvases. In constantly reinventing himself as an artist, he showed the daring also typical of his colourful personal life, a quality he inherited from his much adored parents. While his mother Laura, a devout Methodist, was a vegetarian in an era when it was almost unheard of, his father Kenneth’s mantra was ‘Never worry what the neighbours think’, one which Hockney observed throughout his long career. The fourth of five children, he was born in 1937, two years before the Second World War when paper rationing forced the budding artist to draw in any blank space he could find, including the backs of hymnbooks during chapel services. He would also wake up early and creep downstairs to draw in the white spaces around the edge of the daily newspaper, much to the gentle irritation of his somewhat eccentric father, an accounts clerk and occasional inventor. Long before high-visibility jackets became commonplace, Kenneth made armbands out of fluorescent orange material so that he could be seen at night when crossing the road. Among his quirks was a determination never to throw anything away. Hockney’s older brother Paul remembered how, after his death in 1978, the family found 20 pairs of false teeth in his bedroom cabinet, all neatly labelled — “good for eating lettuce”, “good for eating meat”, “good for smiling”. While at the Royal College of Art in 1959, Hockney's peers mocked his Yorkshire accent, but he quipped: 'I’d look at their artworks and I’d think, well, if I drew like that, I’d keep my mouth shut' After becoming a conscientious objector during World War II, Kenneth was tormented by neighbours, one painting the word ‘coward’ on the Hockneys’ garden wall every night. ‘Every morning, Dad rose early to wash it off before going to work,’ remembered Hockney’s younger brother John. Soon after VE Day, Kenneth was fired for his pacifism and by the time David won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School in 1948, the family were so hard up that he had to wear a secondhand blazer. To make ends meet, Kenneth started a business selling refurbished bicycles and prams and in his workshop the seeds of his son’s ambition to become an artist were sown. ‘Each of the prams featured decorative lines painted by Dad with a long sable brush,’ recalled John Hockney. ‘David was mesmerised by how straight they were and how, with a twist of his hand, Dad created a perfect serif.’ When he made it to London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1959, the other students mocked his Yorkshire accent but he knew his worth even then. ‘I’d look at their artworks and I’d think, well, if I drew like that, I’d keep my mouth shut.’ By the time he had graduated from the RCA in 1962, he was already recognised as one of the most exciting young British artists of the decade and had embraced his sexuality with the same unapologetic candour that characterised the rest of his life. Though being homosexual was still illegal in Britain, he painted openly gay subjects, his early paintings including We Two Boys Together Clinging in which two men exchange a passionate embrace. His life-study painting, a requirement for graduation, was inspired by a muscleman posing on the cover of a homoerotic bodybuilding magazine. It earned him a gold medal of distinction with his diploma and he wore a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony. Homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, but Hockney painted openly gay subjects, including We Two Boys Together Clinging (pictured) named after a famous Walt Whitman poem He rose to fame in the 1960s with his depictions of swimming pools, inspired by his visits to California: ‘Renoir liked plump girls, I like Californian boys' In 1963, he had his first one-man show and the new phase of bright swimming-pool paintings sparked by his subsequent visits to California also brought him major recognition in America. There he relished not just the sunlight but also the chance to paint, and become intimate with, the good-looking young surfers who were very much his sexual type. ‘I do want to do some nudes of boys – sensual + sexy like Renoirs,’ he wrote. ‘Renoir liked plump girls, I like Californian boys.’ After watching a TV advert for a hair-dye, suggesting that ‘blondes have more fun’, he honed the trademark look which defined him for years to come. His first love, Peter Schlesinger, then a 19-year-old art student at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), remembered Hockney, then 29, arriving there as a guest professor in 1966 — ‘a bleached blond; wearing a tomato-red suit, a green and white polka-dot tie with a matching hat, and round black cartoon glasses; and speaking with a Yorkshire accent.’ Schlesinger appeared in numerous Hockney works during the long and ultimately painful relationship which ended in 1972, not least because he wanted to be recognised as an artist in his own right, not just as a sex object in Hockney’s paintings. Their split left Hockney heartbroken but it inspired him to paint one of his most famous works, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). In 2018, that would break the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a living artist, fetching the dollar equivalent of £69 million at Christie’s in New York. After the breakup with Schlesinger, Hockney found a new lover in Gregory Evans, another young Californian. He would appear in more than 40 of his portraits and other artworks but still Hockney enjoyed the hedonistic lifestyle of the large gay community on Fire Island, south of New York. There he hung out with David and Angie Bowie, attended parties thrown by film director John Schlesinger, along with Warren Beatty, Elton John and Charlotte Rampling, and headed out for post-dinner nights of disco dancing — where most people were out of their head on illegal substances. ‘It was totally sex and drugs and rock n roll,’ Hockney recalled. ‘I would take any drugs there that people gave me. ‘The bars closed at 4am. I remember people telling me one time that I was dancing on the counter. I was probably on acid or some other strong thing.’ Such excess didn’t dampen the work ethic which once saw him paint a sign bearing the words ‘Get up and work immediately,’ which he placed at the end of his bed so that it would be the first thing he saw every morning. ’Not only did I read the sign but l remembered that I had wasted two hours painting it, so l jumped out of bed.’ Neither did he forget his roots. He remained close to his family and, following his father’s death in 1978, he invited his mother out to the house he had bought in Los Angeles for Christmas. There she met stars including Michael Caine, who asked her how she liked Hollywood. ‘Nobody seems to hang their washing out, Michael,’ she replied. The 1980s brought more success with his ‘joiner’ photo collages made from hundreds of Polaroids, and celebrated stage designs, including the set for a production of Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles. But he had to give up designing for operas because he could no longer enjoy his passion for music thanks to the deafness he had inherited from his father, so profound that he couldn’t hear the sound of his paintbrush on the canvas. As the relationship with Gregory Evans came to an end, he was left increasingly isolated and lonely at a time when many friends and former lovers were dying during the AIDS epidemic, the general fear about which enabled Margaret Thatcher’s government to pass the Section 28 legislation banning schools and public libraries from ‘promoting homosexuality.’ When Hockney heard about this, he ‘went mad’, he recalled. And even more so when he was told that a copy of verses by C.P. Cavafy, a celebrated 20th century Greek writer known for his homoerotic themes, had been withdrawn from Bradford public library because it was not considered suitable for the open shelves. ‘I deeply detested the person who had done this because I am an Englishman,’ he later fumed. ‘Nanny England was to me a hideous perversity that was, as I saw it, denying my own heritage.’ Despite such frustrations, the 1990s found him spending increasing amounts of time in the seaside town of Bridlington, Yorkshire, where his mother had moved to live with his sister Margaret. During this time, he caused a storm by claiming that advances in naturalism and accuracy since the early Renaissance depended not solely on the genius of the Old Masters but on the invention of optical aids like the camera obscura, a device which could project an image onto a blank canvas for the artist to use as an outline. Pugnacious as always, Hockney got a T-shirt with the words ‘I know I’m right’ printed on it. But suggesting that the great artists might have required any such assistance was regarded as treacherous within the art world and the scorn poured on him, together with his grief following the death of his beloved mother in 1999, sent him into a deep depression. ‘He was taking lots of drugs… and sometimes I would find him unconscious on the floor, having passed out,’ recalled Gregory Evans who lived in the house next to Hockney’s in Bridlington. As with Peter Schlesinger, who had become a lifelong friend, Evans had remained entwined in Hockney’s personal and artistic life long after their romance faded, eventually becoming his business manager. He helped provide the emotional grounding which saw Hockney move from depression into a period of ever more experimentation, including drawing flowers on the iPad, a device he described as ‘like having a studio in your pocket.’ At the other end of the scale, he began working in the open air, painting huge landscapes depicting the Yorkshire countryside. One picture of a coppice near Bridlington, painted on 50 individual canvases over five weeks, was 40 feet wide and 15 feet tall. Despite wheezing with breathing problems, sleeping during some of the day, and being watched over by round-the-clock nurses and by his assistant and long-time partner Jean-Pierre de Gonçalves, he was working until the end. In the summer of 2025 he brought together 400 of his paintings in Paris for his biggest ever retrospective, a major critical and popular hit celebrated as a ‘triumph’ and ‘joyful vision’ of his career. Early 2026 saw him awarded France’s prestigious Légion d’Honneur, followed by his first-ever solo exhibition at London's Serpentine Galleries. Its centrepiece was his monumental, 90-metre panoramic nature frieze A Year In Normandie, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and made up of more than 100 individual iPad paintings depicting the changing seasons around his house in France. Even with his health visibly fading, he refused to stop. Moving into a wheelchair but remaining fiercely sharp-witted, he spent his final months in London launching a defiant burst of new canvases, bluntly telling interviewers, 'I assume 'I’ll die soon, so I want to work every day.' He might never have painted the Queen but in 2012, he had accepted Her Majesty’s invitation to join the Order of Merit, an elite band of the great and the good restricted to only 24 members at any one time. Since he had previously turned down a knighthood on the grounds that prizes of any sort were ‘a bit suspect’, Her Majesty might have been justified in giving up on her elusive subject. That she did not do so is testament to the talent which saw David Hockney move from one medium to another as easily as his lithe youths glided through his painted pools. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. 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