DAVID HOCKNEY
9 July 1937 - 11th June 2026
All photographs courtesy of Christopher Simon Sykes
I first set eyes on David Hockney back in 1965, when I was up in London from Eton College for a visit to the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street who were showing an exhibition of work by new young artists. Hockney was in the gallery, and with his bleached blonde hair, round glasses with green frames, and brightly coloured clothes, he was hard to miss. He was very friendly and his soft Northern accent made me feel at home, being a Yorkshireman myself, and I fell under his spell. I also loved his paintings with their curious figures, and words and numbers drawn on the canvas. I asked my mother, who was with me, if she would buy me one, in particular Two Men in a Shower. She was horrified, both by the price of the painting, £200, which she said she could have done better herself, and the subject matter, but in the end agreed to buy me the cheapest picture in the show, which was a print titled Man, and was of an enormous head perched on two spindly legs. It cost her the princely sum of £5, and it still hangs in the hall of my Yorkshire house. It was the first work of art that I ever owned.
It was not until 2004 that out paths crossed again. I was at home in Yorkshire making a cup of tea in the kitchen, when the phone rang, and it was Lindy Dufferin on the line, the widow of Sheridan Dufferin who had been the co-owner of the Kasmin Gallery. “I’m at the bottom of your drive with David Hockney,” she told me, “and I was wondering if I could bring him up for a cup of tea?”
“You bet” I replied, and shortly after she appeared with him in tow. They stayed for close to two hours, during which time he hardly drew breath, waxing lyrical about the beauty of the Yorkshire Wolds, of the wonderful light, the colours and the big skies, a feature he particularly loved. “When I came here,” he said, “I realised it was a forgotten place. No one other than Sunday painters had ever painted it. I thought ‘The Wolds need its own Piranesi!’ He also had us in stitches talking about the names of some of the local villages. “I love their names,” he laughed. “Burton Flemming sounds like the name of a movie star, Wold Newton, a Las Vegas singer. As for Thwing……” It was an uplifting experience and when they finally left, my wife and I turned to one another and said, “What an amazing man!” From that point on we were completely under his spell, and he became a firm friend.
David was then living in Bridlington, Brid to the locals, in a house that he had originally bought for his mother who he used to visit regularly. He moved there from Bradford after her death in 1999, setting up a studio in an industrial unit close by, an enormous space that he used to navigate around at great speed in a series of wheelchairs. He had a perfect set up, managed by his long-term assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, known as JP, ‘the only Parisian in Bridlington’ as he described himself, and his former partner, John Fitzherbert. It was the first time that he had lived in the area since he was a boy and he loved being back there. “Brid is a terrific place to work,” he told me. We lead a very quiet life, just JP, John and me. John’s a very good cook and looks after the house. We all get on very well. We don’t go to bed very late because we’re up early, especially in the summer. I don’t watch TV much anymore because I can’t quite hear it. I read more than ever. In fact, I’m terrified of having nothing to read so I always make sure I’ve got lots of books on order. Otherwise, I’m painting and drawing. The other advantage here is that you’re just too far from London for people to come for a day. So, you’re outside of that orbit, and that’s an enormous advantage. When people do come and stay, at least we know when they’re coming. Every morning I wake up here and I think ‘All of the day is mine.’
He gave me an example. “One day in February, the morning had been quite sunny, and we were painting between Langtoft and Kilham. The forecast had been for a good sunny morning until one o’clock, when it would start snowing. So I thought, “Well I’ve got till 1.00pm. I got there about 9.30. At 1.00pm we could see the sky changing and it didn’t start snowing till about 2.00pm, and it just came down gently, and I started watching it from one of the bedrooms and I realised there was no wind. It was just coming down straight, and because there was no wind it covered everything, and about 5.00pm, just before it got dark, I said to JP “Let’s go to Woldgate now. We went there and it was absolutely magical. I then realised that there were things you couldn’t see with the human eye, tiny little branches that were covered now with white. It was stunning. JP said he’d never seen anything like this before. I said it won’t last long. It will be gone in a few hours. We were the only people there because everyone else was back in Brid because the TV told them it was a snowy evening. It was like a marvellous drawing. Everything had been outlined in black and white.”
David spent the best part of ten years living in Bridlington, rediscovering the joys of painting landscape and creating a body of work that became his landmark exhibition in 2012, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. It was the most successful exhibition ever mounted at the Royal Academy. Soon after, following the tragic death of his young assistant, Dominic Elliott, he left East Yorkshire and returned to London, to his studio in Pembroke Gardens, where he remained until his death last week. East Yorkshire will not be the same without him.
CHRISTOPHER SIMON SYKES grew up at Sledmere, and went on to become a journalist, photographer and writer. His work has appeared in Vogue, House & Garden, the Sunday Telegraph magazine and Architectural Digest among others, and he wrote and presented Upper Crust, a six-part series on country-house cookery for BBC Two. He has written seven books and photographed for fourteen, including The National Trust Country House Album, The Rolling Stones on Tour and The Garden at Buckingham Palace. He is married with two children and lives in North London.