So the King himself has weighed in, calling David Hockney a ‘giant of the art world’ and a ‘national treasure’. One must resist the urge to roll one’s eyes at such saccharine platitudes, but in this instance, Charles has a point. Hockney, now in his eighties, is that rare thing: a genuinely popular artist whose work has not been rendered sterile by academic fashion or market hype.
He did not begin as a conceptual trickster or a social media sensation. He began as a draughtsman, a painter of pools, lovers, and Yorkshire landscapes. His early work from the 1960s—swimming pools, shower curtains, the Los Angeles light—felt like a liberation from the grey postwar miasma that still clung to Britain.
And then came the photocollages, the opera sets, the iPad drawings. He never stood still. He never waited for permission.
While his contemporaries retreated into theory or celebrity, Hockney kept drawing, kept looking, kept delighting. That is why he is a national treasure: not because of an official seal of approval, but because he reminds us that visual art can be intelligent without being exclusive, and joyful without being shallow. In an era where the art world has become a tedious performance of identity and grievance, Hockney stands as a figure of pure, unapologetic aesthetic engagement.
He is a giant, yes, but one who paints in the open air, not from a fortress of pretension. The King’s tribute is welcome, but Hockney’s true legacy will be the quiet revolution he led: the insistence that beauty, colour, and craft still matter. That is why he is, indeed, a national treasure.
And God knows we need more of those.
