Peter Drawing

Held in the same private collection since 1975, Peter Drawing (1970) is an intimate and evocative depiction of David Hockney’s greatest love and muse: Peter Schlesinger. Rendered in a delicate colour palette, Hockney presents us with Peter sat in a large brown armchair, his gaze directed towards what appears to be a sketchbook on his knee. Silent and pensive, he participates in a quiet act of drawing, perhaps creating his own portrait of the artist sat opposite him. Through soft lines of coloured pencil and crayon, the artist renders his profile in meticulous detail, a technique which manifests most poignantly in the fine, wispy strands of his hair. To his left, an area of exposed paper appears, its field of bright white suggesting a swath of daylight from the right of the picture plane. Executed in 1970, this work was created during a period where drawing had become a central preoccupation for Hockney, independent of the preparation of paintings. The artist’s portraits of Peter in particular had a transformative impact on his practice, his desire to capture his lover’s likeness prompting him to move away from his early stylised drawings towards a more naturalistic mode of representation. In Peter Drawing, Hockney presents us with a magnificent product of this period, inviting us into a quiet and intimate moment with his lover.

Hockney met the eighteen year old Peter in Los Angeles in 1966, where during his attempt to forge a career as an artist, he enrolled in Hockney’s six-week summer drawing course at UCLA. ‘On the first day of class the professor walked in,’ Schlesinger recalls, ‘he was a bleached blond; wearing a tomato-red suit, a green and white polka-dot tie with a matching hat, and round black cartoon glasses; and speaking with a Yorkshire accent … I was drawn to him because he was quite different’ (P. Schlesinger, quoted in C. S. Sykes, Hockney: The Biography. Volume 1 1937-1975, London, 2011, pp. 180-81). During this period, the two established a friendship that would outlive the course, and eventually develop into what would become both Hockney and Schlesinger’s first true romance. In 1967, Peter transferred permanently to the UCLA campus, a move which also led him to settle into Hockney’s rented studio on Pico Boulevard, where he would quickly immerse himself within the artist’s lively literary and artistic circle. As their relationship deepened in the late 1960s, so did Hockney’s desire to capture the intensity of his feelings for Schlesinger, a motivation which sparked a shift towards a more naturalistic drawing style. Deeply autobiographical, Hockney’s depictions of his lover would come to form some of the strongest works of his oeuvre, his sketchbook portraits in particular evoking an intimacy and immediacy that was unavailable through paint. ‘Hockney’s most affecting portraits, not surprisingly, are often those of people with whom he has close emotional bonds', comments Marco Livingstone (M. Livingstone, quoted in M. Livingstone and K. Haymer, Hockney’s People, London, 2003, p. 112). Tender and captivating, and rendered in meticulous detail, Peter Drawing can be considered one of the artist’s most charming portrayals of his greatest muse.