David Hockney and the National Gallery: A lifelong source of inspiration

‘The National Gallery is doing a great job isn’t it?...Everything in the collection is good, every single picture is good. It’s a classic collection of paintings...’ David Hockney 

Our exhibition, Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look (8 August – 27 October 2024), brings together threads from David Hockney’s lifelong relationship with the National Gallery. From seeing the paintings for the first time in books to curating a show of his favourite paintings in the Gallery, this current exhibition celebrates these treasured images. In our Bicentenary year, we mark Hockney’s decades-long fascination with our paintings and their frequent part in his artistic life.  

This article is based on an in-depth conversation between David Hockney and the art critic and author Martin Gayford. The full interview is published in our exhibition catalogue. 

Piero della Francesca's 'The Baptism of Christ' 

We begin with the painting that sparked a lifelong love of the National Gallery. David Hockney’s connection to Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ spans decades. He first saw it as an image in a book at his childhood home just before the Second World War. Decades later, it’s the focus of the 2024 exhibition 'Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look'. It’s a painting about which Hockney doesn’t hesitate when asked whether he’d like to own it, ‘Well yes, that would be fantastic!’ He saw it in the flesh for the first time when he came to London and visited the National Gallery aged 18 in 1955. He had never been to the Gallery before because, as he explains, ‘My family and I thought London was miles and miles away; we didn’t know people who had been there.’ 

As an art student, Hockney returned repeatedly to the Gallery to see 'The Baptism' along with works by Fra Angelico, Van Gogh and Vermeer. He went to exhibitions and galleries, sometimes only taking in a handful of paintings, giving him time to get to know them well. He says, ‘Sometimes I’d just get in to see two or three rooms – the Rembrandts or the Van Goghs.’ 

Hockney’s relationship with Piero’s 'Baptism of Christ' isn’t limited to the physical painting, and encompasses the picture’s reproduction in books, postcards and prints. Postcards and posters are all meaningful ways of looking at a painting for Hockney, as, like many people, he first got to know paintings through seeing reproductions. However, he recognises that a print cannot match the effect of seeing an original. Van Gogh is an artist whose paintings Hockney finds reveal so much more in the flesh. The thick application of paint in trees and clouds, for example, makes standing in front of the painting a different experience to looking at the reproduction. Hockney commented to a friend about a reproduction, ‘You get the image, but you don’t get the painting’.

For Hockney, it is the spatial relationships In 'The Baptism' that make it a great painting. The painting’s Christian subject isn’t especially important to him. We can get pleasure from paintings without needing to know very much about their subject matter. This ties into the idea of slow looking at paintings. Hockney likens the way we enjoy art to the instinctive way we enjoy music ‒ that it is something beyond description: ‘Painting is like music, in that you can’t talk about it very well. You've just got to listen to music. That’s all. And you’ve just got to look at paintings.’ 

'The Artist’s Eye' exhibition 

Hockney first explored the idea of looking and the role of reproductions at the Gallery in the 1981 show 'The Artist’s Eye', an exhibition he curated of pictures from the Gallery, centred around his painting 'Looking at Pictures on a Screen' (1977). Hockney’s choice of paintings included, along with Piero’s 'The Baptism', Van Gogh’s 'Sunflowers' (1888), Vermeer’s Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and Degas’s 'After the Bath' (about 1890‒5).

Paintings in the Gallery have been a source of inspiration for Hockney throughout his career. He has even taken, or in his words ‘borrowed’, details from them and reworked them for his own paintings. The dragon from Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon (about 1470), is the inspiration for a dragon in Hockney’s design for a production of Mozart’s 'The Magic Flute at Glynbourne' in 1978. His painting 'Vincent’s Chair and Pipe' (1988, Lionel Roux/Fondation Vincent Van Gogh/David Hockney) springs directly from Van Gogh’s Chair (1888). Even aspects of paintings, such as the colours and clarity of Fra Angelico’s works, are reflected in the tones of Hockney’s paintings in California. As Hockney explains, ‘They [Italian quattrocento artists] saw things in a wonderfully clear way.’ And it’s this clarity of light that makes California attractive for him: ‘That’s part of the charm of LA and California, you get a Mediterranean climate with American efficiency.’

'Hockney Piero: A Longer Look' 

This latest exhibition is another opportunity to enjoy Hockney’s paintings and their relationship with Piero’s work. Taking a leaf out of Hockney’s book, we can focus on just one or, in this exhibition’s case, three paintings and really look. Looking at a painting for up to an hour is something that Hockney relishes, ‘I enjoy looking at pictures for a long, long time.’ In the exhibition we can let our eyes travel around the figures in the foreground of Piero’s painting and what Hockney calls the ‘little mountains in the background’. 

Like Hockney’s 'Artist Eye' exhibition of 1981, the 2024 show plays on the idea of looking and of reproduction versus original. We see Hockney’s two paintings Looking at 'Pictures on a Screen' (1977) and 'My Parents' (1977) while Piero’s 'The Baptism', also in the exhibition, is the connection that ties the pictures together. It makes an appearance in both Hockney paintings: as a painted reproduction of a photographic reproduction reflected in a dressing table mirror between his parents and as a poster on a screen being looked at by his friend, contemporary art curator, Henry Geldzahler. 

It’s hard to overstate the depth of feeling Hockney has for the paintings in the Gallery, as he puts it, ‘Everything in the collection is good, every single picture is good. It’s a classic collection of paintings one that might grow a bit but remains quite fixed.’ Going back to how he felt it was important to visit as a student, he maintains the idea that the artists live on through their paintings, ‘They are images from the past which really live today, and I think they’ll be there for a long time in the future.’ 

The images can live on beyond the Gallery into the future in our own homes too, through something as affordable as a postcard from the Gallery shop. We can all buy one and take it home and, despite the hundreds of years that separate us from its production, still enjoy its colours, figures and landscape. As Hockney says about how pictures painted many years ago can speak to us today, ‘…they are contemporary. They’re living. The artist might have died but the pictures are still alive. They just get better.’  

Based on 'Looking at pictures a long, long time' 
David Hockney in conversation with Martin Gayford 

Published in the exhibition catalogue Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look by Susanna Avery-Quash with contributions by Martin Gayford, David Hockney and Sacha Llewellyn