Hockney’s first double portrait is a masterpiece of pictorial drama

Amongst David Hockney’s rarest and most revered works are his double portraits, which offer audiences a glimpse into the captivating figures of his social universe. Created between 1968-1975, this series of just seven works began with an arresting painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Isherwood, one of the most important writers of the 20th Century, is renowned for his 1964 novel A Single Man, famously adapted by Tom Ford into a celebrated feature film in 2009, as well as for his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, which served as the basis for Cabaret. In the painting, Isherwood is seated beside his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, a native Californian 30 years his junior, in their sunlit Santa Monica living room. Suffused with tenderness and tension, it is a masterpiece of human and pictorial drama that captures Hockney at the height of his powers.

Offered during Christie’s Fall Marquee Week in November in New York City, Hockney’s Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy will be a major highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale. With its virtuosic composition, rich art historical references and extraordinary psychological depth, it tells an enduring story of intimacy and love, animated by Hockney's genius use of perspective and his close friendship with the painting's subjects. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy has been included in every one of Hockney’s most important retrospectives, including those held at the Whitechapel Gallery (1970), LACMA (1988), Palais des Beaux-Arts (1992), Tate Britain, Centre Pompidou and The Met (2017-2018), and most recently Fondation Louis Vuitton earlier this year.

There are only seven of Hockney’s double portraits in existence: four are held in institutional collections while two constitute the artist’s world record and second highest price achieved at auction. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy has been held in the same private collection for the last 40 years.

California: a beacon of freedom

Isherwood, a friend of British writers W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote, found fame as an author with novels such as Goodbye to Berlin, a semi-autobiographical account of his experiences of Weimar Germany. He and Auden had left Europe for New York in January 1939, before Isherwood headed west to Los Angeles, where he joined a distinguished milieu of European exiles. In Hollywood, he would later write A Single Man, which followed its protagonist through a day of his existence as he mourned the death of his partner. This book has become one of the keystone texts of romantic literature.

Isherwood, then 48, and Bachardy, then 18, were lovers from Valentine's Day in 1953. ‘Don was young and full of life and he was a perfect darling. It was just as simple as that’, Isherwood recalled in The Village Voice in 1985. In 1959, the couple moved to 145 Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. Their home became a hub of cultural discourse where a vibrant community of artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals gathered, akin to Gertrude Stein’s legendary Parisian salon. Hockney’s friend Stephen Spender, another prominent author, supplied a reference, and Hockney introduced himself to Isherwood, also from the North of England, upon his arrival in Los Angeles in 1964. ‘The work tells a very human story of how two people come into each other's lives and build a world of their own’, says Katharine Arnold, Vice Chairman of 20th/21st Century Art and Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Europe. ‘The two men inhabit an ordinary domestic setting, yet are extraordinary for their place at the heart of vanguard culture in 1960s LA.’ The couple remained together until Isherwood died in 1986.

Indeed, as Hockney scholar James Cahill explains, ‘Los Angeles represented an escape ... from the class prejudice and conservatism of so much of British society—a more accepting milieu. [Hockney] became part of a community of émigré writers and intellectuals, many of them exiles from wartime Europe, that included Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and Berthold Viertel. Then as now, Los Angeles was a place for self-reinvention.’

In turn, Hockney’s oeuvre became an enduring meditation on romantic and artistic independence. ‘In this masterpiece’, explains Arnold, ‘Hockney lends his flair for colour and form to capture California’s golden light, in a picture that distils the spirit of the times and immortalises the freedom of people to choose who to love and how to live.’

Hockney’s double portraits and the art of depicting human drama

In each of his double portraits, Hockney uncovers the nuances of a different relationship dynamic between two figures, often a couple. ‘The thing about a great painting is that it becomes like a one-second novel. It condenses everything into that instant’, says Sir Norman Rosenthal, guest curator of David Hockney 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton. In these great double portraits, perhaps none more so than with the present example, Hockney is able to tell us very clearly about a relationship that exists between two people, with all its realities and complexities.

Rosenthal adds that from a formal point of view, the double portraits are especially engrossing because the observer completes the composition, an essential component in the unfolding situation. ‘These paintings share in their almost novelistic depiction of characters whom Hockney presents to us on large horizontal canvases, as though life-size, in such a way that the viewer too can interact with them as though with a friend’, he explains. The triangulated gazes of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy are completed, and granted psychological meaning, in our presence.

‘Within the biographical and creative contexts of the two sitters and the artist, the great double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy completed in 1968 has always been seen as one of the great turning-point masterpieces in the long trajectory of Hockney’s career,’ shares Rosenthal. ‘It is, after all, the first — and, in the opinion of the artist himself, maybe the best — of an amazing series of double portraits, each of them uniquely memorable.’

Hockney’s double portraits are among the most celebrated achievements in modern art. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970) at Chatsworth House in Bakewell, UK, while Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971) and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep (1975) are both in the Tate Collection. These large-scale works showcase the artist’s mastery of realism, light, perspective and formal construction. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is considered amongst the most important of this groundbreaking group.

As Hockney planned the making of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Bachardy suddenly left for London for two months—his face is the only element Hockney could not reference from life, as if he is somewhat mythical. Isherwood and Hockney socialized several times a week, and although the artist worked from photographs in the studio, he continued to study Isherwood from life. The duo’s differences are thus captured even in Hockney’s brushwork, with Isherwood’s face figured with fresh immediacy, and Bachardy’s built up through more slow, studied strokes.

‘The painting he was making shows a domestic scene: two men at ease in their living room’, wrote Katherine Bucknell in her 2024 book Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. ‘…The viewer is inside their world, not a voyeur. The colors are pale and fresh, the light clean, with a quality of purity rather than anything the least bit shady, nocturnal, debauched, or even secretive. The surfaces are spartan, the composition stable, anchored by the piles of books. It’s a confident, luminous portrayal of a same-sex relationship—quietly revolutionary.’

Isherwood’s solicitude towards his younger partner is physically palpable. Hockney wrote in 1976 of one of his painting sessions: ‘... I took a lot of photographs of them in a room, trying to find compositions, how to do it, and whenever I said “relax,” Christopher always sat with his foot across his knee, and he always looked at Don. Don never looked that way; he was always looking at me. So I thought, that’s the pose it should be. And I began the picture.’

‘Within its sparing, luminous tableau, Hockney’s portrait contains a subliminal sense of the larger milieu from which it was born. Capturing a particular moment in a particular room, it also imitates the longer, uncontainable lives of its two subjects — and of the artists — with an almost literary force,’ Cahill tells Christie’s.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s art historical antecedents

‘Hockney has always felt that somehow in making his art, he stands on the shoulders of past masters’, says Rosenthal. Fra Angelico’s 15th-century frescoes at the Convent of San Marco in Florence, for example, made a powerful impression on the artist, in particular The Annunciation, a reproduction of which hung in the corridor of the grammar school he attended. ‘I was looking at it when I was eleven years old. I’ve always loved it’, he was quoted saying in Martin Gayford’s A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (2016). The artist has directly stated the Annunciations of Christian art have inspired his double portraits, writing in 1988, ‘there’s always someone who looks permanent and somebody who’s kind of a visitor.’

Hockney’s all-over compositional grid, at once an honest portrait of a lifelong relationship and a theatre of compelling visual architecture, also echoes aspects of historic masterpieces. The work’s considered geometry, particularly the right-angled forms of the shutters and armchairs, evokes the staged iconography of early Renaissance artists like Piero della Francesca, who Hockney had studied alongside many others at the National Gallery in London. Hockney’s line of sight, which moves around the canvas and includes the viewer, echoes the dynamics of della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (probably about 1437–1445). The limpid, divine sunlight and clean colours create a distinctively West Coast vision befitting the artistic context of 1960s American minimalism.

‘Hockney’s painting is also a subtly yet deliberately and ambitiously conceived masterpiece that exists in a special (and indeed quite rare) occurrence of double portraits in the European grand painting tradition’, says Rosenthal, noting parallels between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and masterpieces of courtly portraiture, such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). In the latter, two men flank a grouping of enigmatic objects, which allude to various forms of scientific and religious knowledge. The foreground’s stylised still-life lends the scene an almost timeless stillness, further recalling the symbolism of medieval Annunciation scenes. However, Hockney cautions against any overly symbolic approach to his work. The objects in Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy were arranged to heighten the picture’s poise and rhythm, not in a cryptic game of allusion. While the table’s still-life and shadows help to direct the work’s triangulation of gazes, this central area of the painting — with its crisp, Cezannesque volumes and smooth nuances of shade — can stand alone beautifully as an independent composition, as evidenced by its use as the striking cover of Nikos Stangos’ 1979 monograph Pictures by David Hockney.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy at Fondation Louis Vuitton

From 9 April through 31 August 2025, Fondation Louis Vuitton presented Hockney’s largest-ever exhibition in Paris. David Hockney 25 featured more than 400 works by the artist across 11 rooms. The exhibition began at the pond level with a selection of iconic works from the 1950s to 1970s, including Hockney’s double portraits, Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971) and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968).

Rosenthal wrote: ‘[The double portraits] exude the spirit of David Hockney’s California, even if two of the scenes are in fact situated in New York and London. They are all pictures of persons in culturally glamorous society, friends of the artist, in their own environments and above all there is always a unique sense of painted light.’

He continues, ‘And nowhere more than in this painting [Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy] that with its three complex evocatively painted still lives on the table in front of the sitters themselves (two piles of unnamed books, a bowl of fruit dominated by a massive banana); the sitters themselves with all their complicated personal histories behind and in front of them; the implied unexceptional homosexual relationship between the two sitters in their separate armchairs, in an age and time even in Los Angeles not to be taken for granted. This and so much more is implied in a precisely dramatic painting — a moment in time held here forever by one of the greatest painters of his time.’