Renowned artist David Hockney has said he did not offer to paint King Charles when the monarch visited his London home on Monday because he doesn’t know him well enough.
This is not the first time that Hockney has shied away from painting royalty. The 87-year-old also refused a number of offers to paint the late Queen Elizabeth II because he only paints people he knows.
Speaking in an interview with the Times, before his latest art show, Hockney said of the king’s visit to his Marylebone home: “He came on Monday for about an hour. But I didn’t offer to paint him.”
Of Elizabeth II he said: “It’s difficult to do the majesty … I thought, she is a genuinely majestic figure, and I just couldn’t see a way to do it.”
The Bradford-born artist said in the interview that his pictures were better if he knew the subject “really well”, and he criticised Lucian Freud’s portrait of the late Queen. He said: “When you look at the queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous. It’s very beautiful skin. Well, he didn’t get that at all.”
In the interview, Hockney explained that he had moved back to London from his former home in Normandy, France in 2023 because of “intrusion”, as “people kept coming round”.
The 87-year-old painter’s latest show, called David Hockney 25, will open in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum and cultural centre.
Hockney talked about the new paintings he had produced from his Marylebone home. One of his efforts, which he calls Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, is a pro-smoking message. “I’m nearly 88 years old and I didn’t think I’d be here. I’m still a smoker, but I’m surviving,” he said.
“I read in the newspaper the other day that lung cancer was going up and smoking was going down. Well, what did that tell me? It told me that it wasn’t really smoking.”
The outspoken artist also remarked on his perceived rise of officiousness: “People are getting very … bossy. There’s an awful lot of bossy people about now. They’re little Hitlers, aren’t they? And there’s lots of them. Bossy bossy boots.”
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Hockney, who began working in the early 1950s, is best known for A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971).
Even though Hockney did not paint the late Queen, he did make a stained glass window for her named the Queen’s Window, which was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 2018.