‘We have always felt completely comfortable in each other’s company. We amused each other. I found posing for him to be a very intimate, and silent, affair…Before commencing we have a conversation about how he wants me to look. I could look left or right. He may say, ‘Move your arm.’ ‘Sit further back.’ ‘Look out of the window’ then comes the moment when he suddenly says, ‘I like that.’ Whilst he’s drawing me I can see the intensity, struggle and concentration on his face. The intensity is extraordinary. After an hour or so he’ll say, ‘do you want to take a break, luvvie?’ Sometimes I take a peek at the portrait, other times I prefer to wait until it’s finished. He always says he doesn’t appeal to vanity. Whatever my feelings are, they are always amazing.’ Celia Birtwell on sitting for David Hockney

Hockney first met Celia Birtwell, the British textile designer and fashion designer in 1968 through the designer Ossie Clark, Celia’s partner at the time and a friend of David’s from Royal College of Art days. The pair grew close and a year later, in the summer of 1969, Hockney was the best man at Celia and Ossie’s wedding. After the breakdown of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger, Hockney and Celia’s friendship strengthened and she would become one of the few women, aside from his mother, that Hockney would know closely. This bond is reflected in the number of works created by Hockney throughout his career which feature Celia; she is the subject of thirty of his prints- a quarter of all his print portraits- and along with Ossie Clark, is immortalized in one of his most infamous paintings, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970-1, now in the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection. (Fig.1)

The present work was produced in Paris just a few months before Celia and Ossie married and it already articulates a wonderful intimacy between the artist and his sitter. Celia’s posture is poised yet relaxed and her eyes are averted in a convivial gesture of acquiesce; the feeling is one of quiet contemplation on both the part of the both people involved. This drawing is one of several that Hockney produced of Celia whilst in Paris and they not only represent Hockney’s growing closeness to her but to the idea of femininity itself. As Henry Geldzahler wrote in 1988,

‘In these drawings we see the influence of a century of French art- Ingres, Degas, Toulouse- Lautrec, Helen, Pascin, Matisse and Balthus. At a time when School of Paris painters have joined American abstractionists in abandoning women as a subject, a provincial painter from the north of England was able to surprise and delight Parisians by continuing a tradition that seemed to be passing away with Picasso.’ (‘Introduction by Henry Geldzahler’ David Hockney by David Hockney, My Early Years, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, p22)

Many of Hockney’s portraits of Celia, like this one, reference the private, domestic scenes of Matisse and late 19th century artists who often depicted women engaged in routine activities, dreaming or sunk in thought. There is an intimacy present not only in the scene depicted but in Hockney’s acute observation of Celia’s appearance, the essential qualities of which are rendered through a single, yet definite line. Hockney’s portraits are often of people he knows well and, as such, it is their character as well as their physical appearance which is articulated in his drawings. When it came to depicting Celia, Hockney was able to take an intuitive approach to his image-making. He has commented,

‘Celia has a beautiful face, a very rare face with lots of things in it which appeal to me. It shows aspects of her, like her intuitive knowledge and her kindness which I think is the greatest virtue. To me she’s such a special person…Portraits aren’t just made up of drawing, they are made up of other insights as well. Celia is one of the few girls I know really well. I’ve drawn her so many times and knowing her makes it always slightly different. I don’t bother getting the likeness in her face because I know it so well. She has many faces and I think if you looked through all the drawings I’ve done of her, you’d see that they don’t look alike.’ (‘Notes on Sitters’ David Hockney Portraits, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2006, p22)

A large proportion of Hockney’s body of work from the late sixties and early seventies is consists of wonderfully delicate and highly skilled ink drawings which depict his close friend , including Peter Schlesinger, Kasmin, Ossie Clark, Mo McDermott and Chrstopher Isherwood, and read as a visual diary of the life he was leading at this time. Up until 1969 painting and printmaking had taken centre-stage in Hockney’s work however in Paris his drawings became more of a focus and he began to approach them as works in their own right.

The task of working in ink is extremely laborious and as the artist explained, it takes a great deal of precision and time; 'I never talk when I am drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more. You can't make a line too slowly you have to go at a certain speed; so the concentration needed is quite strong. It's very tiring as well. If you make two or three line drawings, it's very tiring in the head, because you have to do it all at one go, something you've no need to do with pencil drawings…Its exciting doing it, and I think it's harder than anything else; so when they succeed, they're much better drawings, often.' (Nikos Stangos, David Hockney by David Hockney, My Early Years, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p158)

Hockney mastered this medium in his drawings, managing to describe the very essence of the person sitting before him through a singular line and as Marco Livingstone has recognized,'Hockney's line drawings are without question one of his great legacies to art history.' Marco Livingstone, Hockney's Portraits and People, Thames and Hudson, London, 2003, p84)