Portrait of Douglas Cooper

The present work is a portrait of the critic and art historian Douglas Cooper (1911-1984), who is best known for his role as one of the ‘Monuments Men’ in the wake of the Second World War, and for his prominent Cubist collection. Cooper’s friendship with Hockney began later in his life, and was in a large part due to their shared love of Picasso. Hockney first travelled to Cooper’s home, the Château de Castille in Provence, in the summer of 1967, and would continue to visit over the subsequent decades. It was on one of these trips that Hockney painted Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural. The painting depicts a part of the sculpted mural that was created by Picasso for Cooper in 1962-3, and was sold at Christie’s New York in 2024 for $9million USD. Despite the fact that Cooper was known to be a complicated character, Hockney described him as ‘fascinating person,’ with ‘a mad side to him which I rather liked’ (quoted in conversation with C.S. Sykes, March 2011). The relationship between the two is described in more detail in Hockney’s foreword for the 2025 biography Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi.