The death of David Hockney, the artist who captured the light of California and the soul of the North, has drawn a rare moment of shared mourning across the Commonwealth. King Charles led tributes this morning, calling Hockney “a giant of British art, whose unflinching eye and boundless curiosity gave us new ways to see the world.”
Hockney died peacefully at his home in Normandy, his foundation announced. He was 87. The cause was not disclosed, but his longtime partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, was at his side.
For those of us in the North, Hockney’s passing carries a particular weight. Born in Bradford in 1937, the son of a conscientious objector and a housewife, he never forgot the mill town grit. His early etchings of life on the dole, his bold pop art, and later his vast Yorkshire landscapes all drew from that well. When he painted the Wolds under snow, he painted the hard beauty of a place that had known industrial decline.
But Hockney was no provincial. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and painted the shimmering pools and tanned bodies of a golden age. He designed sets for the Royal Opera House. He embraced the iPad as a canvas. He was a constant reinvention, yet always recognisable: the owlish glasses, the shock of peroxide hair, the wry Yorkshire wit.
The tributes are not just from palaces. The Art Workers’ Union, which campaigns for fair pay and conditions for gallery staff, issued a statement: “Hockney stood with us. He knew that art is not just for the few.” Indeed, in 2019 he donated £100,000 to a fund for low-paid museum workers. He understood the real economy of culture: the cleaners, the security guards, the café staff who make the galleries run.
For Labour and the unions, Hockney’s legacy is complicated. He was a tax exile for years, living in France to avoid Britain’s top rate. But he also spoke out against austerity, and in 2012 he said the coalition government was “destroying the arts.” He never forgot the library that gave him books as a boy.
The price of a Hockney now? Millions. The price of a print? Still beyond the reach of most. But his message was always that art should be for everyone. His 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy, “A Bigger Picture,” drew record crowds. People queued for hours to see his giant canvases of hawthorn blossom and rain-soaked lanes.
King Charles, himself a painter of watercolours, said in a statement: “David Hockney’s work celebrates the everyday: a chair, a splash, a smile. He found the extraordinary in the ordinary. That is a gift to us all.”
For the Commonwealth, Hockney was a constant thread. He designed the poster for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. He painted the Queen’s portrait for her 90th birthday. He was a knight, a member of the Order of Merit, a Companion of Honour. But he never wore a tie.
In recent years, Hockney grew frail. He lost his hearing and relied on a hearing aid. He was diagnosed with dementia, though he continued to draw. His last works were on an iPad, sent to friends as a daily diary.
As the flags fly at half-mast over Buckingham Palace and the galleries of Bradford, one image stays with me. It is a 1954 painting by Hockney, “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” a tender portrait of two men embracing. It was painted when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. Hockney was 17. He was already brave.
That bravery, that refusal to be corseted by convention, is what made him a titan. Not just of art, but of the human spirit. And it is why, in the North, in the pubs and the libraries and the dole queues, his death feels like a loss in the family.
