Robert Littman, Los Angeles, 3 September 1999

David Hockney was fascinated by Renaissance and early modern portraiture. He suggested that many Old Masters used optical aids such as the camera obscura and camera lucida to achieve a striking degree of visual precision. Rather than seeing this as deceptive, he believed that such tools simply offered artists another way of seeing, without diminishing the skill required to translate fleeting projections into fully realised images. This idea emphasises that art has always involved technology, craft, and material experimentation.

The detail seen in Robert Littman, Los Angeles, 3 September 1999 recalls the Renaissance examples Hockney studied, particularly the forensic realism of Jan van Eyck. The camera lucida, a small prism that superimposes an optical trace onto the paper, fascinated Hockney for its ability to register quick coordinates of a face before the image vanished. He wrote of the device: 'you must use it quickly, for once the eye has moved the image is really lost. A skilled artist could make quick notations, marking the key points of the subject’s features … after these notations have been made, the hard work begins of observing from life and translating the marks into a more complete form'.

This understanding of the technique helps illuminate the quick yet assured strokes that define the contours of this present portrait, positioning the work as both an homage to classical art history and a distinctly modern exploration of portraiture.