Of David Hockney,
Painter of Bradford,
and His Marvellous Pools

I've been a fan of Giorgio Vasari's writing for 30+ years and my original copy of The Lives eventually fell apart, so well-thumbed was it.

I've also long had a desire to create some sort of online resource and/or project where I can indulge my interest while maybe learning other useful things (like how to navigate GenAI). So, welcome to Reading Vasari—as well as translations of the Lives themselves I'll blog here regularly as I'm working my way through them with any tangential or tertiary thoughts. It may be of interest to nobody but me and that's fine….

And as a starter for ten, for those who don't know Vasari, I thought I'd give the late lamented David Hockney the Vasari treatment. Enjoy!

Of David Hockney, Painter of Bradford, and His Marvellous Pools

In the county of Yorkshire, amid soot and industry not commonly thought a nursery for genius, Nature, ever fond of surprising us, brought forth in the year 1937 David Hockney, a youth of sharp eye and sharper tongue, destined to teach an entire age to see water and light as though the world had only just been invented.

It is told that upon first beholding the swimming-pools of California, our artist was struck as by a thunderbolt from Apollo himself, and resolved that the trembling, restless patterns of chlorinated water were as worthy a subject as any Madonna or martyrdom the old masters had rendered in oil. He set himself, therefore, to painting light upon water with such patient cunning that critics—a tribe ever slow to marvel—were at last compelled to confess that no brush before his had so captured the particular blue of a Los Angeles afternoon.

Nor did his restless intellect content itself with canvas alone. In his latter years, when other men of his age were content to rest upon their laurels, Hockney took up the little glowing tablet called iPad, and did paint upon it as freely as Leonardo once sketched with silverpoint, declaring—or so it is reported—that a new tool no more corrupts the eye of a true master than a new pigment corrupts the hand.

Of his portraits, wherein he set two figures side by side in domestic stillness, enough has been written by better pens than mine; suffice to say that in them one sees not mere likeness but the very ache of human company.

And so, in the fullness of years, did Nature—who had lent this man her most generous eye—at last call in her loan; and on the eleventh day of June 2026, in his own house in London, David Hockney closed those eyes which had for near ninety years found beauty where lesser men found only water, or grass, or the ordinary faces of those they loved. It is said he went peacefully, and without complaint, as one who had already made his peace with the brevity of things by spending a lifetime trying to hold them still. Let no man mourn him overmuch, for he has left behind pools and gardens and portraits enough to outlast us all, and in this—as in so much else—proved himself the equal of the old masters he so admired, and perhaps, in his restless love of new tools, their better.