Lot Essay
This work is part of a series of so-called "Love Paintings" executed by Hockney between 1960-61, and which includes other famous images such as Doll Boy, We Two Boys Together Clinging in the collection of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. All are painted in the Expressionist, graffiti-like manner, which Hockney derived principally from Dubuffet.
David Hockney remembers fondly the inspiration behind the present work: "Sam Who Walked Alone by Night was painted just after I came back from New York in 1961. I remember buying in New York a magazine called One. It was a kind of literary homosexual magazine, very specifically homosexual; it wasn't really literary. But it was one of the first very obvious gay things. It didn't have any pictures, or very few, and they weren't very sexy; and in it there were little stories. One was about Sam, a little transvestite who every night put on his little pink dress and took a little walk; he only did it at night. I thought it was an amusing story.
Stylistically, the painting's influence is strongly Dubuffet. Dubuffet was, in these 1961 pictures, the strong visual influence. I think it was partly because he was the only French artist who was doing anything that was interesting at the time. I still think, looking back, although I'm not as great a fan as I was, that he did some marvellous pictures in the fifties and sixties, certainly some of the best pictures done in France then. He was much better than those abstractionists like Soulages and Manessier, much, much more interesting. It was his style of doing images, the kind of childish drawing he used, that attracted me. You see, I was in a dilemma which was probably similar to Francis Bacon's; he always said he did want to draw - he never draws now - because it would make his pictures very different if he could draw well. You can see the point. His images have a crudity and vigour which help the impact of the pictures. If they relied on a more refined drawing their effect would be quite different. At the time I could draw figures quite well in an academic way. But that's not what I wanted in the paintings. And so I had to turn to something that was quite away from it, and I think that was the appeal of Dubuffet. Here was an opposite, a crude way. I also liked his work's similarity to children's art, which is like Egyptian art in that it's all the same. So I felt that using that kind of thing was using an anonymous style; and it occurred all the time in those pictures". (As quoted in: Nikos Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 67)
David Hockney remembers fondly the inspiration behind the present work: "Sam Who Walked Alone by Night was painted just after I came back from New York in 1961. I remember buying in New York a magazine called One. It was a kind of literary homosexual magazine, very specifically homosexual; it wasn't really literary. But it was one of the first very obvious gay things. It didn't have any pictures, or very few, and they weren't very sexy; and in it there were little stories. One was about Sam, a little transvestite who every night put on his little pink dress and took a little walk; he only did it at night. I thought it was an amusing story.
Stylistically, the painting's influence is strongly Dubuffet. Dubuffet was, in these 1961 pictures, the strong visual influence. I think it was partly because he was the only French artist who was doing anything that was interesting at the time. I still think, looking back, although I'm not as great a fan as I was, that he did some marvellous pictures in the fifties and sixties, certainly some of the best pictures done in France then. He was much better than those abstractionists like Soulages and Manessier, much, much more interesting. It was his style of doing images, the kind of childish drawing he used, that attracted me. You see, I was in a dilemma which was probably similar to Francis Bacon's; he always said he did want to draw - he never draws now - because it would make his pictures very different if he could draw well. You can see the point. His images have a crudity and vigour which help the impact of the pictures. If they relied on a more refined drawing their effect would be quite different. At the time I could draw figures quite well in an academic way. But that's not what I wanted in the paintings. And so I had to turn to something that was quite away from it, and I think that was the appeal of Dubuffet. Here was an opposite, a crude way. I also liked his work's similarity to children's art, which is like Egyptian art in that it's all the same. So I felt that using that kind of thing was using an anonymous style; and it occurred all the time in those pictures". (As quoted in: Nikos Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 67)