Peter
Signed Print

A man stands naked on a tiled floor. His hands are on his hips, his eyes gaze off into the middle distance, avoiding those of the artist and viewer. He wears a chain around his neck and his hair is elegantly coiffed. The wall behind him is bare, as is typical of many of David Hockney's etchings. While the man’s figure is athletic there is something strange about the proportions of Hockney’s drawing of him; it is almost as if we are looking down at him from a slightly elevated perspective which has the effect of making his legs look short and which takes some of the confidence away from his stance. The subject is of course Peter Schlesinger, David Hockney’s onetime lover and constant ‘muse’. Schlesinger is perhaps best associated with Hockney’s pool paintings, where he appears as the man looking down at the figure in the water in the record breaking Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and the main subject in Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool. The two met in 1966 when Schelsinger enrolled in a summer drawing class taught by Hockney at UCLA, and became lovers. Dating to 1969, this intimate portrait is a bold celebration of gay love that relates closely – in style as well as subject – to the series entitled Illustrations For Fourteen Poems By C.P. Cavafy.