My Parents

Laura Hockney looks towards her son; Kenneth Hockney bends over a book. Between them, a green trolley supports flowers and a small mirror, making a third centre of interest in a portrait of two people. David Hockney’s My Parents gives these separate activities the scale and deliberation of a formal painting. Its subject includes the experience of sitting together: the different ways people occupy a room, direct their attention and accommodate another person’s presence.

Completed in 1977, the picture is an oil painting on canvas measuring 182.9 × 182.9 centimetres. Tate purchased it in 1981. Its square format allows space for both figures and the objects between them, without turning their surroundings into a panoramic interior. ^[1]

Kenneth and Laura

Hockney’s parents belonged to the Bradford world recorded in his early drawings. The National Portrait Gallery describes their household as an unconventional working-class family which supported his decision to become an artist. Kenneth worked as a clerk, drew and painted as an amateur, campaigned against smoking and held strong political views. Laura was a committed Methodist, vegetarian and teetotaller. These were individuals with convictions and interests of their own, long before they became familiar figures in their son’s pictures. ^[3]

That familiarity mattered to the making of the portrait. Speaking to curator Sarah Howgate in September 2019, Hockney remembered his mother as a good sitter. His father found prolonged stillness difficult and repeatedly picked up a book; eventually Hockney incorporated the reading into the painting. The pose therefore records a practical negotiation between painter and sitter. Kenneth could do something that interested him while his son continued to work. ^[4]

Their bodies establish different rhythms. Laura’s hands rest together in her lap, and her feet are placed close to one another. Kenneth’s downward look and differently positioned feet make his posture less settled. The Bucerius Kunst Forum’s teaching resource draws attention to precisely these contrasts between hands, feet and gaze. Hockney allowed the two figures to remain distinct within a shared arrangement: one offers a sustained frontal presence, while the other’s attention follows the pages in his hands. ^[5]

We meet Laura’s gaze where the painter would have stood. Kenneth’s book creates another destination for the eye, within the painted room. The resulting triangle involves mother, father and son even though only two of them are bodily present. It also leaves the viewer with two different kinds of encounter: being looked at, and watching someone absorbed in an activity. Hockney’s account of the sittings makes this difference particularly tangible. ^[4]

A room organised around attention

The central trolley joins the figures while preserving the interval between them. Its shelves provide a compact structure for books; above them the flowers and mirror lead the eye upwards. The furniture’s plainness gives each object a clear position. A shift from a face to a book becomes consequential within this spare setting. ^[5]

Light from the left catches Laura’s hair and blue dress; Kenneth’s brown suit is more subdued. ^[6]

The square holds the outward-facing sitter and the reader in balance, while the still life gives us somewhere to look between their faces. These different destinations keep the eye moving around a composition whose human subjects remain seated.

Hockney’s own explanation of the subject began with everyday companionship. In the recollection preserved by his Foundation, he noticed how his parents could be together while each did something different. After decades of marriage, communication included the face and familiar small actions as well as conversation. This is a useful way into the picture’s quietness. Separate gazes can coexist with shared experience; the space between the chairs gives that coexistence a visible form. ^[7]

Laura’s willingness to pose and Kenneth’s need for occupation are both accommodated. Nothing in the arrangement requires a definitive verdict on the marriage. The portrait’s interest lies in the behaviour Hockney chose to observe and in the painterly order he gave it.

From My Parents and Myself to My Parents

The project developed over several years. The Morgan Library’s label for Study for “My Parents and Myself” dates that coloured-pencil drawing to 1974 and connects the preparatory work with visits his parents made while he was living intermittently in Paris between 1973 and 1975. In the study, Hockney inserted himself through a reflection in the mirror on the cart. A proposed family portrait thus became a means of asking where the artist himself belonged within the family group. ^[8]

The National Gallery states that two earlier attempts preceded the completed My Parents. One earlier campaign was painted over, as the Foundation’s chronology records. The surviving unfinished My Parents and Myself, dated 1976 by the National Portrait Gallery, is a separate oil painting with masking tape still attached. The Gallery explains that the tape had held paper over the central area while Hockney reworked its surroundings. It is material evidence of an unresolved composition, not a deliberate finish adopted for the Tate picture. ^{[9] [7] [3]}

The decisive change is easy to describe but has considerable effect. In the earlier work the mirror contains Hockney’s own face. In the completed painting it reflects a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. The artist removes his literal likeness from the centre, giving the parents and the reflected picture different relations to the surrounding space. We now have to infer his position through Laura’s gaze and through the objects he selected. ^[9]

The unfinished picture remained important to him despite his dissatisfaction. When it was first publicly displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in 2020, the Foundation recorded his explanation that he had kept it because it had been painted from life and his parents were no longer alive. That later attachment brings a second history to the work: an abandoned artistic problem could become a valued record of time spent with particular people. The completed 1977 painting and the unfinished 1976 canvas therefore preserve different forms of achievement, and different stages of the same sustained attention. ^[10]

Books and a still life

Kenneth’s reading has a subject as well as a practical purpose. The book is Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography. On the trolley, a volume about Chardin accompanies books identified in Tate’s acquisition catalogue, as reported by art historian Jamin An, as an English translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. These references introduce Hockney’s own interests into the room alongside his parents. They also give the still life a different kind of duration: books are things to return to, handle and spend time with. ^[11]

Chardin provides a particularly relevant comparison. His paintings gave sustained attention to ordinary domestic activities and objects. The Bucerius Kunst Forum connects the Chardin book with Hockney’s interest in people, form and colour, placing this family sitting within a history of painters finding subjects in the occupations and belongings around them. ^[5]

The books also complicate any easy distinction between a portrait and a still life. Kenneth uses a book; other books rest on the shelf; the mirror returns a picture to our attention. An object may be part of someone’s immediate activity and part of the painter’s arrangement at the same time. The flowers introduce a further change of shape among the rectangular furniture, books and mirror. The central group becomes a bridge between the human bodies and the small, ordered surfaces that surround them.

Piero in the mirror

The reflected Baptism is a reproduction of the National Gallery’s painting, dated by the Gallery to probably about 1437–45. Hockney paints a reflected image of a reproduction: several stages separate it from the Renaissance original. The mirror extends the room beyond the main view, while the reproduction brings another painter’s construction of space into his own. ^[9]

Historical comparison: Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, probably about 1437–45, National Gallery, London, NG665. A reproduction of this painting appears in the mirror in My Parents.

For Hockney, reproductions could sustain a real relationship with a picture. The National Gallery’s account of his conversation with Martin Gayford describes his repeated visits to its collection and his enjoyment of paintings through books, postcards and posters. It also preserves his distinction between the information a reproduction carries and the experience of standing before painted matter. He included Piero’s Baptism in the National Gallery selection he curated for The Artist’s Eye in 1981. In My Parents, a modest reproduction becomes part of the environment in which people sit, read and look. Art history enters the room through something that can be kept close at hand. ^[12]

The religious subject should be considered alongside that history of looking. Laura’s Methodism is documented, but the National Gallery’s account states that Hockney especially valued Piero’s spatial relationships; the Christian narrative was less important to him. The reflected image can therefore hold different associations without becoming a fixed declaration of either sitter’s beliefs. Its position makes it central to the composition, while its status as a favourite picture keeps it closely connected to the artist. ^{[3] [12]}

Green drapery also appears in the mirror. Its precise identification has been disputed in scholarship, and the broader effect does not depend on resolving that question: the reflection makes the room a place containing other images as well as people. An argues that the absence of Hockney’s face need not amount to the artist’s disappearance from the picture. His choices and artistic attachments can make him present in another way. This is an interpretation of the revised composition, rather than evidence of a single concealed intention. ^[11]

Oil paint and the double portrait

The painting belongs to Hockney’s sustained investigation of pairs of people in interiors. The Tate and Musée Granet account of his naturalistic work emphasises the combination of informal poses with the scale and formality of traditional portraiture. It also places drawing and photography together within his investigation of figures, light and pictorial depth. My Parents brings that ambition into an especially familiar setting, where the sitters’ habits had been known to him for years. ^[13] The Foundation locates its completion at Powis Terrace in London, where Hockney had expanded his studio. ^[7]

Its medium deserves attention. The completed canvas is oil, while the earlier Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is acrylic. Both are carefully constructed encounters with people in a room, but a single label such as photographic realism cannot explain the full range of decisions involved. Preparatory drawing, a sitter’s movements and the painter’s revisions all contribute to the final arrangement. The surviving parents study and unfinished canvas make that process unusually visible in the documentary record. ^{[1] [8] [3]}

The finished room has the clarity of something settled, yet its history is one of adjustment. The mirror was reconsidered; the father’s reading was accommodated; the family grouping had to be attempted again. That difference between the apparent stillness of a picture and the activity required to make it is central to Hockney’s portraits. Here it gives the quiet scene a particular density: several kinds of looking and several periods of work have been brought into one durable arrangement.

Later portraits and a longer look

Kenneth died in February 1979. Hockney’s Mother, Bradford. 19 Feb 1979 was made on the day of the funeral. The Morgan’s label identifies its economical sepia-ink line and Laura’s direct gaze, and explains that the artist later mistakenly inscribed the year as 1978. This is a distinct drawing, made under different circumstances from the 1977 double portrait. Its small scale and reduced means make an affecting comparison with the room, furniture and paired figures of My Parents. ^[14]

Laura continued to sit for her son across changing media. In an essay for the National Gallery of Victoria, curator Meg Slater places My Parents within that longer relationship and reads Laura’s upright attention as an expression of the bond between mother and son. Slater also cautions, in discussing later photographs, against allowing knowledge of a sitter’s death to reduce a lifetime of images to anticipations of loss. The 1977 painting rewards the same care: it records people living, reading and being painted in one another’s company. ^[15]

The Foundation records William Feaver’s contemporary description of the painting as “devoted and altogether fine”. In 2024, the National Gallery exhibited it beside Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977) and Piero’s original Baptism. Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look ran from 8 August to 27 October, bringing the reflected reproduction into a direct conversation with its source. ^{[7] [9]}

The comparison extends the painting beyond family biography without loosening its attachment to Kenneth and Laura. A mother looks towards her son, a father reads, and an admired painting appears in a mirror. Each directs attention differently. Hockney gives them room to coexist, asking us to move between a person’s face, an everyday action and the images through which a painter continued to learn to see.