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Lot Essay
'All the paintings I'd been doing at this time had two figures in them, close together or directly linked...I realised that a reasonable way to unite figures...was to put them in a theatrical or stage-like setting. I hit upon the idea of the hypnotist at work. One of the sources for the idea was a scene in a movie called The Raven, where Vincent Price and Peter Lorre are magicians seated in a large room. The camera doesn't move much as they appear on each side of the screen, and each tried to impress the other with his magic...After a few tricks Vincent Price in his anger uses his hands like a hypnotist and green electric bolts fly between his finger tips and Peter Lorre's. My version has a rather evil-looking hypnotist and an innocent helpless-looking boy (he has no visible arms). This was one of the few paintings from which I also made an etching. I drew the etching plate with the figures in the same position as in the painting, but of course when it was printed it was reversed. Seeing both pictures together made me realise that even pictures read from left to right'. (David Hockney by David Hockney, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976, p. 90)