Chateau Mouton Rothschild 2014

Rich, deeply colored, well-structured and very full-bodied.

About the Label Artwork

Born in 1937, David Hockney is one of the greatest British artists of our time, having quickly secured his place in the painters’ pantheon. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London with a gold medal in 1962, he immediately embarked on a successful career. The following year he met Hopper and Warhol in the  United States, where  he discovered Pop Art, and went on to teach at the University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles. He settled in Los Angeles, a haven of sunshine and freedom, in 1966.

He consistently draws inspiration for his paintings from his immediate surroundings, in landscapes, still-lifes and portraits of friends, and has embraced a wide range of techniques over the years, from acrylics and Polaroid photographs to the iPad. He became famous for his paintings of Californian swimming pools in which the human presence, explicit or suggested, is redolent with an atmosphere of ambiguous sensuality. In his portraits, a genre in which he has always excelled, the faces, painted without concession, combine the classical precision of Ingres with the flamboyant colours of Van Gogh.

His triumphant exhibition, 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life, at the Royal Academy in London was followed by memorable retrospectives in 2017 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Tate Britain in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which demonstrated the visual strength, precise draughtsmanship and modernity of an unclassifiable, virtuoso artist.

Hockney was a personal friend of Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, who died in 2014 and to whom his drawing pays tribute. Haloed by vibrant lines of force, signifying both emotion and wonder, two glasses, one empty, the other full, tell the story of feverish expectation and the constantly renewed miracle of the birth of a great wine: Château Mouton Rothschild, of which Baroness Philippine was for so long the guiding spirit.