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Who Were the Couples That Posed for David Hockney’s Famed Double Portraits?
One of his subjects was a cousin I never knew. I wanted to learn more about the large-scale portraits that helped define the English artist’s legacy
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David Hockney’s double portraits explore a very specific dynamic: relationships between two people who know they’re being observed by a third.
Painted in the 1960s and ’70s, these seven large-scale works depict two subjects positioned a few feet apart. In several examples, one figure turns toward their companion, while the other gazes out at the viewer.
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The third portrait in this series features Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first 20th-century art curator, and his partner Christopher Scott. Christopher, who died in 2002, was also my cousin. I only know what he looked like through family photos and home videos—and, bizarrely, a $49.5 million painting.
When Hockney died last week, at 88, I contacted Christopher’s younger brother, David Scott, who told me more about the portrait’s debut. “At that point in time—and, actually, for quite a few years later—Chris was referred to as Henry’s ‘assistant,’” he said. Although their relationship was an open secret, they weren’t yet officially out as a couple. Because most of Hockney’s double portraits featured well-known duos, “people were bound to ask, ‘Who the hell is Christopher Scott?’” David said. “At the time, I felt that it was sort of funny.”
I wanted to learn more about Hockney’s subjects. Fortunately, for journalists, researching questions we’re curious about is part of the job. To commemorate the artist’s sprawling career, here are five of the double portraits that helped define his legacy, presented in chronological order.
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968)
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When Hockney moved from London to Los Angeles in 1964, a mutual friend introduced him to the writer Christopher Isherwood. Both men had grown up in northern England, and they quickly became friends.
Isherwood met the artist Don Bachardy, his partner, in the 1950s. They were among the earliest well-known gay couples living openly in Hollywood. Hockney was a frequent visitor to their home in nearby Santa Monica, which became the setting of his 1968 portrait. During a preparatory photo shoot, Isherwood “always sat with his foot across his knee, and he always looked at Don,” Hockney later wrote. “Don never looked that way; he was always looking at me. So I thought, that’s the pose it should be.”
In the painting, the two men sit in armchairs, with a bowl of fruit, an ear of corn and two stacks of books visible on a low table in front of them. Isherwood’s head is turned toward Bachardy, who stares directly at the viewer.
“Bachardy’s full-frontal curiosity about the world and Isherwood’s worried concern about his lover capture the complex dynamics of this relationship,” author Edmund White wrote in David Hockney Portraits. This kind of composition—which the Met describes as “a triangulation among the two subjects and the viewer”—would become the foundation of Hockney’s series.
American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968)
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That same year, Hockney painted Fred and Marcia Weisman, who were among the world’s top collectors of modern and contemporary art. Initially, Marcia had asked him to paint her husband—but the artist, who rarely accepted commissions, suggested a double portrait of the couple instead.
In the finished painting, the Weismans stand in the garden of their Los Angeles home, where artworks from their collection are on display. “The portrait wasn’t just in the faces, it was in the whole setting,” Hockney wrote in his 1988 autobiography. Adorned in a pink robe, Marcia gazes at the viewer. Fred is positioned closer to the foreground, but he’s turned toward Marcia, his hand curled into a tight fist.
“As stiff and still as the objects surrounding them, the couple stands apart, his stance echoed in the totem pole to the right, hers in the Henry Moore sculpture behind her,” the Art Institute of Chicago writes. “Brilliant light flattens the scene and sets the couple in sharp relief.”
Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969)
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In December 1968, Hockney visited Geldzahler and Scott in New York City. The artist spent four days drawing and photographing the couple’s Seventh Avenue apartment. After coming down with the flu, he returned to London, where he worked on the portrait over the next several months.
At the time, Geldzahler was planning the Met’s first blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art. When it opened the following year, New York magazine predicted that the 50,000-square-foot show would “undoubtedly establish Geldzahler as the most powerful and controversial art curator alive.”
Scott, an artist himself, was also part of the New York art scene, playing a central role in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He was a quieter presence, while Geldzahler was famously “gregarious and witty,” according to Hockney biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. Hockney was “intrigued by what made the relationship work.”
In the painting, Geldzahler sits in the middle of a pink sofa (a piece of furniture that had been rejected by the Met), staring straight ahead, with his right leg resting on his left knee. Scott stands on the side of the canvas, facing the curator. A “slight figure in a raincoat,” he “seems to be on his way out the door,” per Hockney’s New York Times obituary. Despite this impression, the couple stayed together for more than a decade.
Hockney created many artworks featuring Geldzahler, but the double portrait was a “watershed painting,” the curator told the Washington Post in 1979. “In his picture, David finally gave up the idea of being a ‘modern artist’ and decided, instead, to be the best artist he could be.”
To determine the angle of the parquet floor, Hockney stretched tape across the canvas from the vanishing point, which was just above Geldzahler’s head. “There were 20 or 30 tapes radiating from his head,” the artist told the Post. “At that stage, it looked like an incredible radiant glow from a halo around Henry’s head—with an angel in a raincoat visiting him.”
Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-71)
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Textile designer Celia Birtwell married fashion designer Ossie Clark in 1969. Two years later, Hockney, who had been their best man, gifted them this portrait.
In the piece, both subjects gaze out at the viewer “with expressions of reflective dignity,” the Times wrote when the painting debuted in 1971. Clark leans back in his chair, cocking his head to the side, while Birtwell stands in a self-assured pose, with her hand planted on her hip. The titular Percy is a white cat perched on Clark’s lap, though her actual name was Blanche; Percy was the couple’s other cat.
Hockney wrestled with this painting, repeatedly reworking certain sections, including Clark himself. “I probably painted the head alone 12 times; drawn and painted and then completely removed, and then put in again, and again,” the artist later explained. “You can see that the paint gets thicker and thicker there.” In the years that followed, Birtwell sat for Hockney dozens of times, becoming one of the artist’s most enduring muses.
“I don’t know what to make of this title ‘muse’ because I don’t look like a model,” Birtwell wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in 2020. “That was never on the cards. So when I see David’s painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy in a gallery, it’s hard for me to stare at because it’s so personal. People talk about how he’s sitting down, she’s standing up, what does that mean? All I can say is that he couldn’t draw Ossie’s feet very well—that’s why they’re hidden in the shag-pile carpet!”
Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972)
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Hockney frequently painted California’s swimming pools, experimenting with various techniques to capture light reflecting off the water. In the early 1960s, he later recalled, “there were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn’t even know what it looked like. … I suddenly thought, my God, this place needs its Piranesi”—the 18th-century Italian artist known for his etchings of Rome.
Quick facts: One of David Hockney’s best-known pool paintings
- The artist painted A Bigger Splash from a photo in 1967, three years after moving to California.
- “When you photograph a splash, you’re freezing a moment, and it becomes something else,” Hockney explained. “I realize that a splash could never be seen this way in real life. It happens too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I painted it in a very, very slow way.”
In 1972, Hockney completed Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures). The painting features an unknown subject swimming underwater as a man in a pink jacket peers over the pool’s edge. This man is Peter Schlesinger, Hockney’s former partner.
After the couple separated, “Hockney soon discovered that the solution to his unhappiness was to throw himself into work,” Sykes wrote. The semi-fictionalized documentary A Bigger Splash would later dramatize the artist’s struggle to finish the painting.
The idea came from two photos lying on the floor of Hockney’s studio. Because of the way they were positioned, the figure in one appeared to be staring down at a swimmer in the other. The artist tinkered with the piece for months, but just weeks before it was scheduled to go on display in New York, he decided to repaint it.
This time, Hockney shot hundreds of photos of a friend swimming underwater in different lighting conditions. He also took new shots of Schlesinger, who posed in a pink jacket in Kensington Gardens in London. He finished the piece the night before he sent it to New York. By titling it Portrait of an Artist, “David is giving Peter his birthright, his mess of pottage,” Geldzahler wrote in 1981. “He’s calling him an artist.” Nearly 50 years after its completion, the work sold for $90.3 million, becoming the most expensive painting by a living artist ever auctioned.
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