David Hockney

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1962

London, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, David Hockney, Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970, 1970, p. 23, no. 61.13, illustrated
London, Editions Graphiques Gallery, David Hockney: A Private View, 1988
Modena, Santa Margherita Palazzina dei Gardini, Pop Art UK: British Pop Art 1956-1972, 2004, p. 73, illustrated in colour

Nikos Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, Spain 1984, p. 54, no. 28, illustrated
Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, Somerset 1988, p. 34, no. 35, illustrated in colour

“The Last of England? is a key autobiographical work from his [Hockney's]  student period. The childlike, naïve idiom he employed at that time, particularly in pictures on such intimate themes, is poignant and affecting; as a borrowed, anonymous style it brings him close in spirit to the use of found commercial modes by his Pop-orientated colleagues. The presentation of the painting in a gold mount, with a lettered title and the phrase ‘Transcribed by David Hockney 1961’ turns the entire work into a kind of found object, a parody of museum art. Notwithstanding the anachronistic source and the self-revelation of the imagery, this picture transforms the picture into a brilliant demonstration of the Pop ethos.” (Marco Livingstone cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Modena, Santa Margherita Palazzina dei Gardini, Pop Art UK: British Pop Art 1956-1972, 2004, p. 72)

The Last of England? is an icon of British Pop art and one of David Hockney’s most important student works. Made whilst he was in his final year at the Royal College of Art in response to the rigid, academic criteria of the three year painting course that required each student to produce a transcription of a famous work from the history of art, Hockney’s choice of Ford Maddox Brown’s pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, The Last of England (1855), as the picture from which to create a composition of his own at first seems an arbitrary one. In fact it is loaded with autobiographical reference and gives one of the earliest indications of the complex autobiographical symbolism that he was to develop in some of his best mature works.

Several years previously, Hockney had noticed the tendency of students to avoid engaging with the content of their art-historical sources and merely using them as the basis for investigations into brushwork, surface and composition. Whilst displaying his admiration for the work of Francis Bacon, by contrast Hockney here looks to the meaning of Brown’s masterpiece depicting a couple emigrating to Australia in the 19th century and transforms the found image into an account of his own imagined future. Taking the husband’s place at the left and identifying himself with the numerals ‘4.8’ (a reference to David Whitman's code in which letters of the alphabet are replaced with their numerical order), he throws his arm around the object of his own romantic fantasy, the pop star Cliff Richard, who is identified here as ‘DB’ or ‘Doll Boy’ – a nod to the singer’s 1959 breakthrough hit single Living Doll. One of the first of an important series of autobiographical paintings which Hockney made in honour of his love for the star, in an intriguing act of living out the mythical subject depicted here, several months later, Hockney flew to New York for the first taste of what became an enduring love affair with America.