Secrets of the £62m swimming pool
That’s the record sum this Hockney masterpiece is set to fetch on Thursday — and behind it lies an intoxicating tale of sun, sex and celebrity
ORIGINALLY just a cluster of stone cottages on a dirt track, Le Nid du Duc, in Provence, was long a magnet for the great, good and occasionally rather naughty. everyone from Judi Dench to Jack Nicholson, Nureyev to Sir John Gielgud, joined director Tony Richardson and his wife Vanessa Redgrave (until they split in 1967, after which actress Jeanne Moreau and later Grizelda Grimond took their places in Richardson’s bed) for their summer holidays.
As parrots squawked and peacocks trailed their fantastic tails, guests spent the long, hot days lounging around the pool in jeans, trunks or pants, chatting, drinking, chain-smoking, sketching and playing chess. The nights were spent drinking champagne and Provencal rosé beneath a trail of coloured fairy lights on the terrace and, often, skinny dipping.
Scripts were written, portraits painted, songs composed and love affairs conducted — indeed, positively encouraged by the bisexual Richardson, whose obliging major-domo, Caliban, a former pavement artist, could be relied on to sleep with anyone of either sex.
Pretty much anything went, and the summer of 1969 was typically heady.
Guests that year included the artist David Hockney — round-faced and canary-haired — along with his lover and muse, the artist and photographer Peter Schlesinger. Painter Patrick Procktor and fashion designer Ossie Clark were also there, along with the latter’s heavily pregnant wife Celia Birtwell.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a boy from Bradford, even one who had decamped to California some years earlier, Le Nid du Duc (‘the nest of the night owl’) made a lasting impression on Hockney. The villa and its pool became the backdrop for several of his great works over the next two years.
The most famous, Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) is due to be auctioned by Christie’s in New York on Thursday.
With a £62million estimate, the painting, which belongs to billionaire Spurs owner Joe Lewis, is expected to break all records for a living artist. The current record is held by American Jeff Koons’s Orange Balloon Dog sculpture, which sold in 2013 for £45 million.
The 10ft by 7ft canvas features Hockney’s muse Peter Schlesinger — overdressed and melancholy — looking down at an underwater swimmer who was apparently a young photographer, John St Clair. It is one of Hockney’s best known and most reproduced works.
But it wasn’t actually painted in Provence that summer.
THe idea for it came two years later — soon after he and Peter had gone through a devastating break-up — thanks to the chance juxtaposition of two photos on the floor of Hockney’s studio in Powis Terrace, Notting Hill.
‘One was of a figure swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted...the other was a boy gazing at something on the ground,’ he once explained. ‘The idea of painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began immediately.’
It did not begin auspiciously. After six months of working and reworking, Hockney ripped it up, only to return to it in the run-up to a New York exhibition in 1972.
Armed with new photos of the villa and his former lover standing in a pink jacket, cream trousers and brown shoes in Kensington Gardens, he started again.
Second time round, it took just two weeks. He worked 18-hour days and finished the night before the shippers arrived to pack it.
Critics were entranced, and the following year he sold it for £20,000 to a man who heard from someone who spotted it in his studio and asked to buy it. Six months later, it was sold again for £50,000.
David Hockney, the fourth of five children born to creative, politically radical, working-class parents, had always wanted to be an artist.
Growing up in Bradford, he would watch his father paint old bikes and prams and knew he’d spend his own life painting.
He was cheeky, bright and always a bit different from his peers. Inspired by a TV advert for Lady Clairol hair lightener, he dyed his hair bright yellow, added deliberately eccentric glasses and plastered his bedroom wall with pictures of his teenage crush, Cliff Richard.
He excelled as a scholarship boy at Bradford Grammar until he realised that art was taught only to those in the bottom set. He duly ceased all study until his parents reluctantly agreed to art school — first in Bradford when he was 16 and later, in 1959, at the Royal College of Art.
even there he stood out, partly because of his appearance but more for his prodigious talent and work ethic. ‘I thought I was a hedonist at the time but when I look back I was always working,’ he once said.
He went to plenty of parties, though — first in London, where in 1961 he starred in the Young Contemporaries show, and a decade later when he moved to California and fell in love.
Peter was a handsome 18-year-old art student ten years Hockney’s
junior. They met in 1966. In an effort to spend time with him, Hockney asked to paint him. Peter soon became his muse and together they moved back to London, where they became a fixture with the fashionable set.
They were duly invited to Le Nid du Duc, which Richardson, the director of A Taste Of Honey and The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, bought in 1965 and spent a fortune renovating.
Everyone who was anyone stayed in his ‘magical’ hideaway of eight stone houses with bright blue front doors.
As writer John Mortimer once said: ‘There never seemed to be fewer than 20 guests; cleaning ladies, children, John Gielgud perhaps, or Nureyev, sat down to lunch together.’
There was even an annual summer show, with rehearsals and posters. Vanessa Redgrave once played Titania in a Nid du Duc Repertory production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and her daughters Joely, now 53, and Natasha, who died in 2009 aged 45, did their first acting there.
But in the summer of 1969 there was an ominous undercurrent.
Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell’s relationship was fraught. Hockney was exceptionally close to both of them, had been best man at their wedding that year, and had given them his most celebrated painting — Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy — as a wedding present.
But Ossie regularly fought with his wife and, immediately after the ceremony, had decamped with another woman for several days and promptly sold Hockney’s painting for £7,000.
Meanwhile, beautiful blond Peter Schlesinger was beginning to edge away from David.
When they did split, Hockney was devastated. But nothing could extinguish the wit, lightness and exuberance of his works, or his love of colour.
Nearly half a century on, Hockney’s work has been featured in more than 40 solo exhibitions and includes painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolours, photography and works drawn and painted on iPads. In September this year his stained-glass window celebrating the Queen’s reign was unveiled at Westminster Abbey.
Meanwhile, long after Tony Richardson’s death in 1991 from an Aids-related illness, Le Nid du Duc remained the summer hub for the Richardson clan, including Liam Neeson, Natasha’s widowed husband, and their two sons — along with endless thespian guests, including Ian McKellen and Ralph Fiennes.
Until finally, earlier this year, the family sold it for about £3 million.
Which is an awful lot more than Richardson paid for it in 1965. But a fraction of what Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) is likely to fetch on Thursday.