Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)

A painting made twice

Hockney began Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in late 1971 and worked on it for about four months before abandoning it, unhappy with the angle of the pool. The image had started from two photographs he found lying side by side on his studio floor: a 1966 photograph of a swimmer in a Hollywood pool, and a picture of a boy staring down at the ground.

In early 1972 he started again. In April he photographed the pool and landscape at Le Nid du Duc, the film director Tony Richardson's villa near Saint-Tropez in the south of France. He photographed Peter Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens in London for the standing figure, used his studio assistant Mo McDermott to work out the pose, and had the photographer John St Clair swim for the figure under the water.

Then he painted against a deadline. Working in a two-week sprint of 18-hour days, he finished and varnished the canvas the night before it had to be shipped to New York. "I literally finished the painting the night before it had to be sent off to the exhibition," he recalled. It went on view at André Emmerich's gallery in New York from May 13 to 31, 1972.

Hockney, Schlesinger and California

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, in the north of England. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962 and moved to Los Angeles in 1964. Southern California's light, its swimming pools and its people became the subjects that made his name; A Bigger Splash, his best-known pool painting, followed in 1967.

In the summer of 1966, while teaching at UCLA, Hockney met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who began posing for his paintings and drawings. The two were together until 1971. Their breakup is the background to this picture: the clothed Schlesinger stands at the edge of the pool and looks down at a swimmer gliding toward him underwater, a double portrait of two of Hockney's lasting themes, the pool and the couple, colored by attachment and loss.

Hockney said he worked 14 or 15 hours a day in this period to escape the turmoil in his personal life. The period was later the subject of A Bigger Splash, a 1974 film about Hockney directed by Jack Hazan. Asked about the picture in 2018, Hockney returned to its central problem: "How do you paint water? How do you paint something transparent?"

From $18,000 to $90.3 million

The painting sold from the 1972 exhibition to James Colonsay Langhorne Astor, of the Astor family, and his wife for $18,000. Hockney's own recollection, given in 2018, was that his dealer sold it for roughly $20,000, "a lot of money at the time, but within six months it was sold again for $50,000."

The entertainment executive David Geffen acquired it in 1983 and held it until 1995, when he sold it to the British billionaire Joe Lewis. It was lent to Hockney's large retrospective, which opened at Tate Britain on February 9, 2017, and traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; at Tate Britain the show became the most-visited exhibition in the gallery's history.

Lewis consigned the painting in 2018. It was offered without a reserve, so it would sell at whatever price the room reached, with an estimate in the region of $80 million, and the sale's organizers published a special catalog for it running to more than 100 pages. On November 15, 2018, in New York, with Hockney 81 years old, it sold after about nine minutes of bidding to a buyer on the telephone. The hammer price was $80 million; with fees it came to $90.3 million.

The buyer was not named at the time. Later reports identified him as Pierre Chen, the Taiwanese founder and chairman of the electronics company Yageo.

The living-artist record

The sale made Hockney the most expensive living artist at auction. The previous mark belonged to Jeff Koons, whose orange Balloon Dog sculpture sold for $58.4 million in 2013. It also more than tripled Hockney's own auction record, $28.45 million for Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica, set only six months earlier in May 2018.

The record lasted six months. In May 2019 Koons's stainless steel Rabbit sold for $91.1 million, edging past the Hockney. Reports of that sale gave the Hockney figure in round numbers, as $90 million or $90.2 million; the reports of the 2018 sale itself give $90.3 million.

Hockney died at his home in London on June 11, 2026, at 88.

How to know it

The painting is acrylic on canvas, 213.5 by 305 centimeters, about seven by ten feet. A clothed man stands at the edge of a pool, looking down; beneath the surface a swimmer moves toward him in breaststroke; behind them rises a rocky, hilly landscape drawn from the south of France.

It is often confused with A Bigger Splash (1967), his best-known pool painting, which belongs to Tate in London. Portrait of an Artist has two figures, the standing man fully clothed, and is much larger.

No catalogue raisonné number is given in the sources reviewed for this story. The full title includes the parenthetical (Pool with Two Figures), which is how many accounts refer to it.

The numbers

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Dimensions

213.5 x 305 cm (about 84 x 120 in)

Catalogue raisonné

No number stated in the sources reviewed

Current owner

Reported to be Pierre Chen, founder of the Taiwanese company Yageo; not confirmed at the time of sale

Timeline

1. Jul 9, 1937

   David Hockney is born in Bradford, England.

2. 1964

   Hockney moves to Los Angeles.

3. 1966

   Hockney meets Peter Schlesinger while teaching at UCLA.

4. 1971

   Hockney and Schlesinger separate; late in the year Hockney begins the first version of the painting and later abandons it.

5. Apr 1972

   Hockney photographs the pool at Tony Richardson's villa near Saint-Tropez.

6. May 13, 1972

   The finished painting goes on view in New York, through May 31; it sells for $18,000.

7. 1974

   A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan's film about Hockney, is released.

8. 1983

   David Geffen acquires the painting.

9. 1995

   Geffen sells it to the British billionaire Joe Lewis.

10. Feb 9, 2017

    Hockney's retrospective opens at Tate Britain, later traveling to Paris and New York.

11. May 16, 2018

    Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica sets a Hockney auction record of $28.45 million.

12. Nov 15, 2018

    Sells at auction in New York for $90.3 million with fees, a record for a living artist.

13. May 2019

    Jeff Koons's Rabbit sells for $91.1 million, taking the living-artist record.

14. Jun 11, 2026

    David Hockney dies in London at 88.

The world in 1972

• Jan 30, 1972

  British soldiers kill 14 unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, on Bloody Sunday.

• Feb 21, 1972

  President Nixon begins his eight-day visit to the People's Republic of China.

• May 26, 1972

  Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT I arms limitation agreements in Moscow.

• Jun 17, 1972

  Five men are arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate.

• Sep 1, 1972

  Bobby Fischer defeats Boris Spassky to become the first American world chess champion.

• Sep 5, 1972

  Eleven Israeli athletes are killed in the attack at the Munich Olympics.

• Dec 1972

  Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, flies.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is number 7 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (7 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Hockney finished and varnished the painting the night before it was shipped to its first exhibition.
• The swimmer is not Schlesinger but the photographer John St Clair; the pool belonged to film director Tony Richardson.
• Hockney recalled that within six months of its first sale it changed hands again for $50,000.
• It was offered in 2018 without a reserve, so it would have sold at any price.
• It held the record for a living artist at auction for only six months, until Jeff Koons's Rabbit sold for $91.1 million in May 2019.
• The 2018 price more than tripled Hockney's previous auction record, set just six months earlier.