David Hockney – born and raised in the often cold and rainy land of Yorkshire, England – is best known for his dazzling paintings of sun-dappled swimming pools. Having moved to Los Angeles in 1964, the artist was captivated by California’s endless sunshine, palm trees and laid-back lifestyle. Openly gay, Hockney turned his gaze on beautiful bronzed men lounging poolside, portraying them naked or semi-clothed, bathed in the golden light of this utopian water world.
One man in particular inspired Hockney: Peter Schlesinger. In paintings from the 1960s and ’70s, Schlesinger sunbathes and cools off within the clear blue water of private swimming pools. He is also present in one of Hockney’s most recognisable Californian canvases, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from 1972, which made headlines around the world in November 2018 when it sold for $90.3 million at auction – at that time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.
In the painting Schlesinger is dressed in brown shoes, white trousers and a hot pink jacket; standing at the edge of a swimming pool and looking down, he watches as a man, visible beneath the rippling water, swims towards him. In the distance is a boldly coloured landscape, adding to the sultry atmosphere. While it’s a warm, inviting scene, there is also a sense of intrigue: why is Schlesinger, typically pictured in various states of undress, clothed so formally? In order to understand this painting and Schlesinger’s place in it, we must visit London via LA – so let’s dive straight in.
Schlesinger had dreamt since childhood of becoming an artist, and was fortunate enough to be supported by his family. ‘My father, who was into photography, gave me my first camera,’ he recalls. His parents also signed young Peter up for a summer camp where he could take photography courses, and took him to art classes at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1966, at the age of eighteen, Schlesinger enrolled in a drawing class at UCLA – a decision that would change the course of both his career, and his life.
Schlesinger notes the memorable first day of class: ‘The professor walked in – he was a bleached blonde; wearing a tomato-red suit, and green and white polka-dot tie with a matching hat, and round black cartoon glasses; and speaking with a Yorkshire accent.’ Schlesinger had just met Hockney, then a relatively unknown artist, whose ‘image and personality intrigued’ him. The feeling was very much mutual, as Hockney has recalled: ‘He was just the kind of person I’d been hoping to meet in my class.’
Outside school, tutor and student were soon spending a huge amount of time together, first as friends, and then as romantic partners. During weekends when his parents were away, Schlesinger would invite the painter back to his home where they, like most other Californian families, had a pool in their backyard. The couple also enjoyed lounging at the houses of shared friends, including the contemporary art dealer and gallery owner, Nick Wilder, who appears in numerous swimming-pool paintings from this period.
It was Wilder’s home which served as the setting for Hockney’s large canvas, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966). Painted the same year that the artist and his muse met, it depicts Schlesinger naked and alone in their friend’s pool; pictured from behind, he uses his athletic arms to pull himself up and out of the blue water, which ripples in abstracted wavy white lines, iridescent in the midday sun. Scenes of Schlesinger relaxing semi- or completely naked poolside allowed Hockney to modernise what he referred to as the ‘three-hundred-year tradition of the bather as a subject in painting’.
However, from a more autobiographical perspective, Hockney’s pool paintings also act as a visual diary for the growing intimacy between him and Schlesinger. Although Hockney never painted himself into portraits with his muse, in Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool two empty deckchairs, positioned in front of the wall of Wilder’s minimalist house, hint at Hockney’s presence beside Schlesinger. Before long, the pair were living together in Hockney’s small home in Santa Monica, which the painter documented in intimate drawings of Schlesinger reading, reclining on their bed and cleaning his teeth in the bathroom doorway.
In the summer of 1967, the couple left California to embark on a tour of Europe. Hockney continued to make simple sketches of his muse, in which Schlesinger looks relaxed in a T-shirt and shorts, resting on deckchairs, and in one watercolour he is seen taking a bath in a French spa. Similarly, Schlesinger took colour photographs of Hockney, many of which have been published in his book, A Chequered Past. These images show Hockney posing playfully on the streets of Paris and Venice, while one unstaged shot – which echoes the artist’s watercolour of Schlesinger – captures Hockney reclining in a bathtub overflowing with foamy bubbles. These photographs read like any romantic couple’s holiday pictures, taken to record happy memories.
Schlesinger’s photographs also document the next stage of the couple’s relationship: following their travels across Europe, he persuaded Hockney to move to London, where they lived together in Hockney’s flat in Notting Hill, then still an affordable area. Hockney invited Schlesinger to decorate it as he wished, and it was soon filled with antiques from the nearby Portobello Road market. By the autumn, Schlesinger had also secured a place at London’s esteemed Slade School of Fine Art, where he could continue with his painting studies; encouraged by Hockney, who recognised his ‘considerable talent’, Schlesinger hung new work in their shared home.
Just as Hockney had been charmed by suburban California, Schlesinger was enthralled by London and everything this artistically rich city could offer him: ‘He [Hockney] represented a world outside my own that I was eager to embrace.’ When not studying, he was introduced by Hockney to leading figures from the art, design and fashion world, whom he took as his own muses. Schlesinger’s closely shot portraits record the couple taking tea with contemporary artists Gilbert and George, meeting Paloma Picasso and watching Manolo Blahnik have his hair cut.
One striking photograph pictures Hockney and Sir Cecil Beaton, sitting side by side on wicker chairs, in the plant-filled conservatory of the society photographer’s grand mansion. ‘Hockney and I spent many weekends at Cecil Beaton’s country house in Wiltshire. It was called Reddish House and was partly real Edwardian and partly a theatrical creation of Cecil’s. He had kept scrapbooks for years, which he let me look through, and they were an inspiration for my own albums,’ Schlesinger has reminisced, giving voice to the inspiration which other artists can provide for one another.
Far from a one-way relationship, Schlesinger also introduced Hockney to his own newly made creative friends from London’s art world; among the most significant was British textile designer Celia Birtwell, who dressed celebrated figures from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix in her romantic floral prints. Birtwell became another subject for Schlesinger: in one informal photograph she stands casually in the couple’s Notting Hill home, resting one arm against their white mantelpiece, a full bookshelf in soft focus behind her. Wearing a flowing white scarf and a baby blue sweater, which matches her eyes, Birtwell smiles in an unforced manner for the camera; it’s an intimate portrait of her as both artist and muse, mirroring Schlesinger’s own status at the time.
Schlesinger was also instrumental in Birtwell befriending, and then modelling for, Hockney: ‘It was only when Peter Schlesinger became his partner that I really got to know him. Peter would often come round to my flat for tea and David would collect him.’ Birtwell went on to star in many paintings, including the reputed double portrait, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71). Within her light-filled London flat, Birtwell stands, one hand on her hip, in a floor-length black-and-red crêpe dress which had been created for her by her then husband, the fashion designer Ossie Clark. Wearing a green jumper and trousers, Clark lounges on a modern metal-framed chair, with their white cat perched on his knee. With a backdrop of pale decor and furnishings, the painting emphasises the creativity of the couple whose bright outfits symbolise their identity as artists, as well as muses.
In many ways, Schlesinger’s London life – among this group of like-minded individuals – sounds like the ideal existence for the emerging artist: ‘I would flit in and out of the Slade but I had this whole other life with David, a very un-studenty life.’ However, this double existence created tensions for Schlesinger, who increasingly felt the power imbalance inherent in his romantic partnership with the older artist. Today, the student–teacher love affair, even when consensual and between adults, is frowned upon; and although still not banned at most universities, it is increasingly considered an abuse of authority. Hockney’s relationship with Schlesinger should also be viewed through this lens: the painter was in his thirties when he met his student, who was then still just a teenager.
In an interview with art historian Marco Livingstone, Hockney, looking back at his time in California, referred to Schlesinger as ‘a young, very sexy, attractive boy… the sexy boy of your fantasy’. This impression of him is explicit in the artist’s swimming-pool paintings. In Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, the artist invites the viewer to join him in staring at his model’s nude body, whose rounded buttocks have been exaggerated with an erotic charge. Schlesinger seems to exist in this dreamy painting for the pleasure of Hockney’s male gaze – just as we find in paintings of the female nudes who existed to be looked upon as sexual objects across art history.
Hockney’s swimming-pool paintings, in which Schlesinger features as an attractive young muse, have been much celebrated for the artist’s open acknowledgement of gay desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal in both Britain and America; it took California until 1975 to repeal its sodomy law. In fact, it was Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool which propelled Hockney’s career to the next level. In 1967, the year that homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain, this was the picture which won Hockney the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize; historically, a win has been the turning point for artists, and the same was true for Hockney.
But being framed in Hockney’s idealised paintings as a sex object and muse was unhelpful for the younger man, who was intent on forging a creative career of his own. Although his association with Hockney gained him entry into exclusive art-world circles, Schlesinger explained, in an interview with Christopher Simon Sykes in 2020, that wherever he went he was known as ‘David Hockney’s boyfriend’. Defined, above all, by his romantic status, Schlesinger’s individual artistic identity was being subsumed by Hockney’s.
Throughout history, the status of romantic muse has plagued many individuals who were also artists. Among the most significant is Camille Claudel who, in 1883, entered the studio of sculptor Auguste Rodin, where she would become his best student, then later model, muse and mistress. While learning and taking inspiration from Rodin, her own identity as an artist was overlooked, and she ultimately decided to leave him. Like Claudel, Schlesinger found himself in the shadow of an older, more established artist, particularly following the couple’s move to London where Hockney’s reputation was growing rapidly; he thus began to resent the unequal power dynamic.
This shift in Schlesinger’s experience, and subsequent feelings, is apparent in Hockney’s portrayals of his muse from this time. In the large acrylic on canvas, Sur la Terrasse (1971), Schlesinger stands on the balcony of a hotel room, viewed by Hockney through open French windows. With his back turned to the artist, who is painting his portrait, Schlesinger stares into the distance, surveying the exotic Moroccan landscape. Hockney based the painting on a series of photographs taken in the couple’s room at the Hôtel de la Mamounia in Marrakesh, where they had spent two weeks in February earlier that year.
In contrast to the intimate sketches and photographs the couple had taken to document their joyful trip across Europe, this painting reflects the growing gap between Hockney and Schlesinger. Within the composition, diagonal dark shadows on the floor further distance Hockney, and the viewer, from Schlesinger. It’s a poignant and sad scene, in which Hockney symbolically anticipates the couple’s inevitable separation: on their return from the trip to Morocco, Schlesinger moved out of Hockney’s London home, rented his own flat in Notting Hill and soon afterwards entered into a new relationship with Swedish illustrator and fabric designer Eric Bowman.
Meanwhile, Hockney was, in his own words, ‘heartbroken’. ‘It was very traumatic for me,’ he would later recall. ‘I’d never been through anything like that. I was miserable, very, very unhappy.’ As Hockney’s biographer Christopher Simon Sykes has written, Schlesinger was ‘the love of his life’. It wasn’t just Schlesinger’s looks which had attracted Hockney; he also found him ‘intelligent’ and ‘curious’, and for years they had shared friends, travels, gallery visits and more. While friends begged him to try to make it work, and suggested he create a separate studio for Schlesinger, Hockney understood his partner’s need for artistic independence and knew that he would have to say goodbye.
During this period, Hockney threw himself into painting: ‘Whereas with Peter I often went out on an evening, from then on I didn’t. For about three months I was painting fourteen, fifteen hours a day. There was nothing else I wanted to do. It was a way of coping with life. It was very lonely; I was incredibly lonely.’ Hockney started a new canvas, inspired in part by his discovery of two contrasting photographs lying side by side on the floor of his studio: ‘One was of a figure swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted… the other was a boy gazing at something on the ground. The idea of painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began the painting immediately.’ The picture upon which Hockney had embarked was the famed Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).
Hockney spent six months working on the canvas before, in the end, destroying it. Speaking in hindsight about his process, he admitted, ‘I struggled on and on and fiddled on with it, realising it didn’t work, couldn’t work.’ He could have been speaking about his romantic relationship with Schlesinger, which was by then irreparable. However, in April 1972 Hockney decided to return to the concept in order to ‘repaint the picture completely’. Perhaps having recognised what was missing, the painter asked Schlesinger to pose once again for him and, luckily, the young man agreed. Early one Sunday morning, the pair went to London’s Kensington Gardens, where Hockney photographed his muse looking down at the ground, wearing a bright pink jacket, white trousers and brown shoes – just as he appears in the final image, although transported to the edge of a swimming pool in California, where he looks upon another swimming man.
Armed with photographs of Schlesinger, Hockney worked on his painting for eighteen hours a day for two weeks, footage of which was included in the 1973 film, A Bigger Splash. Directed by Jack Hazan, it’s a semi-fictionalised documentary about Hockney, which focuses on the declining relationship between the artist and his muse; the painter, turning his romantic torture into art, creates the great masterpiece, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which acts as a reflection of their break-up. This has led many critics to surmise that the second man swimming underwater not only stands for lost love but Schlesinger’s new partner, Bowman; Schlesinger, however, refutes this reading.
Hazan’s film both sensationalises Hockney’s relationship with Schlesinger and perpetuates myths about the muse: while the older painter speaks at length, Schlesinger poses silently for him, appears nude for the most part, and in one scene engages in an explicit gay sex scene, which got the film banned for a time. Blurring the boundaries between autobiography and fabricated fantasy, the narrative unhelpfully depicts Schlesinger as a romanticised, passive object of desire, which was so problematic for the young artist.
Hockney, who had never intended for his partner to be cast in second place, was horrified by the way in which his relationship with Schlesinger had been framed in the film. In an interview, Hazan recalled the painter’s distress: ‘There was a lot of trouble at first – he was upset and had no idea there was a narrative of him breaking up with his lover.’ The artist attempted to ban the film from being shown, and didn’t speak to anyone for two weeks, perhaps angry that not only Schlesinger, but also his painting, had been misrepresented.
Although Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) may be tinged with personal sadness, Hockney had also painted it as a powerful tribute to his muse. In contrast to the earlier canvases in which Schlesinger swims or sunbathes naked, here he has been lifted out of the pool. Clothed in a trendy pink jacket, he has been depicted in the celebratory manner of Hockney’s other artist–muses Birtwell and Clark in their fashion-focused double portrait. Moreover, staring down at the male figure swimming beneath the water, Schlesinger is engaged in the act of looking. This emphatic shift in the representation of him is echoed by the deliberate titling of the work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), through which Hockney points to his muse’s identity as an artist.
In this acclaimed canvas, Hockney also transported Schlesinger back to his homeland; he stands beneath the sunshine of the States, illuminated in golden light. The completed painting foreshadowed real life: in 1978, Schlesinger left London and returned to America with his new partner, Bowman. He has since forged his own successful career as an artist, gaining particular recognition for creating large-scale ceramic sculptures which merge classical shapes with abstraction: ‘I like exploring the form language of ancient vessels,’ he told one interviewer, ‘and trying to twist that and push it in different ways.’
It’s impossible not to see the influence of Hockney in the rippling lines which cover the surface of Schlesinger’s sculptures – proving the difficulty that artists-as-muses, particularly those who sit for more established artists, will always face. However, we must also recognise the enormous debt that Hockney owes Schlesinger, the defining protagonist of his most iconic swimming-pool paintings. Hockney himself identified the momentous impact of Schlesinger on his work, honouring him with the grand, cinematic canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in which his muse is positioned centre stage.
Five years later, Hockney painted his muse once again, far away from any pool, in a strikingly simple but powerful painting. In Peter Schlesinger with Polaroid Camera (1977) Schlesinger sits alone in an armchair, within a room painted vivid green. Dressed in a purple suit, with a bow tie, he stares assuredly out of the canvas. As if meeting Hockney’s eye, Schlesinger seems to have accepted his role as muse but only because he is now being portrayed on equal terms to the painter – beside him is his Polaroid camera positioned on a tripod. From serving Hockney’s needs in the early swimming-pool paintings, here Schlesinger has been represented in the way in which he wanted, and deserves, to be perceived – as an artist.