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Thomas Gainsborough RA FRSA (14 May 1727 (baptised) – 2 August 1788) was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited (with Richard Wilson) as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.

He was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and maker of woollen goods, and his wife Mary, the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs. One of Gainsborough's brothers, Humphrey, had a faculty for mechanics and was said to have invented the method of condensing steam in a separate vessel, which was of great service to James Watt; another brother, John, was known as Scheming Jack because of his passion for designing curiosities.

The artist spent his childhood at what is now Gainsborough's House, on Gainsborough Street, Sudbury. He later resided there, following the death of his father in 1748 and before his move to Ipswich. The building still survives and is now a house-museum dedicated to his life and art.

When he was still a boy he impressed his father with his drawing and painting skills, and by the time he was ten years old he had almost certainly painted heads and small landscapes, including a miniature self-portrait. Gainsborough was allowed to leave home in 1740 to study art in London, where he trained under engraver Hubert Gravelot but became associated with William Hogarth and his school. He assisted Francis Hayman in the decoration of the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, and contributed one image to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children.

In 1746, Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who had settled a £200 annuity on her. The artist's work, then mostly consisting of landscape paintings, was not selling well. He returned to Sudbury in 1748–1749 and concentrated on painting portraits. While still in Suffolk, Gainsborough painted a portrait of The Rev. John Chafy Playing a Violoncello in a Landscape (c.1750–1752; Tate Gallery, London).

In 1752, he and his family, now including two daughters, Mary ("Molly", 1750–1826) and Margaret ("Peggy", 1751–1820), moved to Ipswich. Commissions for portraits increased, but his clients included mainly local merchants and squires. He had to borrow against his wife's annuity. Toward the end of his time in Ipswich, he painted a self-portrait, now in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

In 1759, Gainsborough and his family moved to Bath, living at number 17 The Circus. There, he studied portraits by van Dyck and was eventually able to attract a fashionable clientele. In 1761, he began to send work to the Society of Arts exhibition in London (now the Royal Society of Arts, of which he was one of the earliest members); and from 1769 he submitted works to the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions. The exhibitions helped him enhance his reputation, and he was invited to become a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1769. His relationship with the academy was not an easy one and he stopped exhibiting his paintings in 1773.

Despite Gainsborough's increasing popularity and success in painting portraits for fashionable society, he expressed frustration during his Bath period at the demands of such work and that it prevented him from pursuing his preferred artistic interests. In a letter to a friend in the 1760s Gainsborough wrote: "I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease." Of the men he had to deal with as patrons and admirers, and their pretensions, he wrote: "... damn Gentlemen, there is not such a set of Enemies to a real artist in the world as they are, if not kept at a proper distance. They think ... that they reward your merit by their Company & notice; but I ... know that they have but one part worth looking at, and that is their Purse; their Hearts are seldom near enough the right place to get a sight of it."

Gainsborough was so keen a viol da gamba player that he had at this stage five of the instruments, three made by Henry Jaye and two by Barak Norman.

In 1774, Gainsborough and his family moved to London to live in Schomberg House, Pall Mall. A commemorative blue plaque was put on the house in 1951. In 1777, he again began to exhibit his paintings at the Royal Academy, including portraits of contemporary celebrities, such as the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland. Exhibitions of his work continued for the next six years. About this time, Gainsborough began experimenting with printmaking using the then-novel techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching.

During the 1770s and 1780s Gainsborough developed a type of portrait in which he integrated the sitter into the landscape. An example of this is his portrait of Frances Browne, Mrs John Douglas (1746–1811) which can be seen at Waddesdon Manor. The sitter has withdrawn to a secluded and overgrown corner of a garden to read a letter, her pose recalling the traditional representation of Melancholy. Gainsborough emphasised the relationship between Mrs Douglas and her environment by painting the clouds behind her and the drapery billowing across her lap with similar silvery violet tones and fluid brushstrokes. This portrait was included in his first private exhibition at Schomberg House in 1784.

In 1776, Gainsborough painted a portrait of Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach's former teacher Padre Martini of Bologna, Italy, was assembling a collection of portraits of musicians, and Bach asked Gainsborough to paint his portrait as part of this collection. The portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

In 1780, he painted the portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte and afterwards received other royal commissions. In February 1780, his daughter Molly was married to his musician friend Johann Christian Fischer, to Gainsborough's dismay, as he realized that Fischer was forming an attachment to Molly while carrying on flirtation with Peggy. The marriage between Molly and Fischer only lasted 8 months due to their discord and Fischer's deceit.

In 1784, Principal Painter in Ordinary Allan Ramsay died and the King was obliged to give the job to Gainsborough's rival and Academy president, Joshua Reynolds. Gainsborough remained the Royal Family's favorite painter, however.

In his later years, Gainsborough often painted landscapes. With Richard Wilson, he was one of the originators of the eighteenth-century British landscape school; though simultaneously, in conjunction with Reynolds, he was the dominant British portraitist of the second half of the 18th century.

William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of him "to his intimate friends he was sincere and honest and that his heart was always alive to every feeling of honour and generosity". Gainsborough did not particularly enjoy reading but letters written to his friends were penned in such an exceptional conversational manner that the style could not be equalled. As a letter writer Henry Bate-Dudley said of him "a selection of his letters would offer the world as much originality and beauty as is ever traced in his paintings."

In the 1780s, Gainsborough used a device he called a "Showbox" to compose landscapes and display them backlit on glass. The original box is on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum with a reproduction transparency.

He died of cancer on 2 August 1788 at the age of 61. According to his daughter Peggy, his last words were "van Dyck". He is interred in the churchyard St Anne's Church, Kew, Surrey, (located on Kew Green). It was his express wish to be buried near his friend Joshua Kirby. Later his wife and nephew Gainsborough Dupont were interred with him. Coincidentally Johan Zoffany and Franz Bauer are also buried in the graveyard. As of 2011, an appeal is underway to pay the costs of restoration of his tomb. A street in Kew, Gainsborough Road, is named after him.

The art historian Michael Rosenthal described Gainsborough as >"one of the most technically proficient and, at the same time, most experimental artists of his time." He was noted for the speed with which he applied paint, and he worked more from observations of nature (and of human nature) than from application of formal academic rules. The poetic sensibility of his paintings caused Constable to say, "On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them." Gainsborough's enthusiasm for landscapes is shown in the way he merged figures of the portraits with the scenes behind them. His landscapes were often painted at night by candlelight, using a tabletop arrangement of stones, pieces of mirrors, broccoli, and the like as a model. His later work was characterised by a light palette and easy, economical strokes. Gainsborough's only known assistant was his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont.

His more famous works, The Blue Boy; Mr and Mrs Andrews; Portrait of Mrs. Graham; Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters; William Hallett and His Wife Elizabeth, nee Stephen, known as The Morning Walk; and Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, display the unique individuality of his subjects. Joshua Reynolds considered Girl with Pigs "the best picture he (Gainsborough) ever painted or perhaps ever will.".]

Gainsborough's works became popular with collectors from the 1850s on, after Lionel de Rothschild began buying his portraits. The rapid rise in the value of pictures by Gainsborough and also by Reynolds in the mid 19th century was partly because the Rothschild family, including Ferdinand de Rothschild began collecting them. In 2011, Gainsborough's portrait of Miss Read (Mrs Frances Villebois) was sold by Michael Pearson, 4th Viscount Cowdray, for a record price of £6.54M, at Christie's in London. She was a matrilineal descendant of Cecily Neville, Duchess of York.
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David Hockney OM CH RA (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

Hockney has owned residences and studios in Bridlington, and London, as well as two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu, and an office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.

On 15 November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. This broke the previous record, set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million. Hockney held this record until 15 May 2019 when Koons reclaimed the honour selling his Rabbit for more than $91 million at Christie's in New York.

David Hockney was born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, to Laura and Kenneth Hockney, a conscientious objector in the Second World War, the fourth of five children. He was educated at Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art (where his teachers included Frank Lisle and his fellow students included Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and John Loker) and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While there, Hockney said he felt at home and took pride in his work.

At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured – alongside Peter Blake – in the exhibition Young Contemporaries, which announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements, similar to some works by Francis Bacon. When the RCA said it would not let him graduate if he did not complete an assignment of a life drawing of a live model in 1962, Hockney painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. He had refused to write an essay required for the final examination, saying he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded the diploma. After leaving the RCA, he taught at Maidstone College of Art for a short time. He taught at the University of Iowa in 1964. Hockney also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1965. Then taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1967, followed by the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.

In 1964, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium using vibrant colours. He lived back and forth among Los Angeles, London, and Paris in the late 1960s to 1970s. In 1974 he began a decade-long personal relationship with Gregory Evans who moved with him to the US in 1976 and as of 2019 remains a business partner. In 1978 he rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, and later bought and expanded it to include his studio. He also owned a 1,643-square-foot beach house at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which he sold in 1999 for around $1.5 million.

In the 1990s, Hockney returned more frequently to Yorkshire, usually every three months, to visit his mother who died in 1999. Until 1997, he rarely stayed for more than two weeks, when his friend Jonathan Silver, who was terminally ill, encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. He did this at first with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. In 1998, he completed the painting of the Yorkshire landmark, Garrowby Hill. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for longer and longer stays, and by 2003 was painting the countryside en plein air in both oils and watercolour. He set up residence and studio in a converted bed and breakfast, in the seaside town of Bridlington, about 75 mi (121 km) from where he was born. The oil paintings he produced after 2005 were influenced by his intensive studies in watercolour, a series titled Midsummer: East Yorkshire (2003–2004). He created paintings made of multiple smaller canvases—two to fifty—placed together. To help him visualise work at that scale, he used digital photographic reproductions to study the day's work.

In spring 2020 Hockney stayed at La Grande Cour, a farmhouse and studio in Normandy, during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Hockney has experimented with painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolours, photography, and many other media including a fax machine, paper pulp, computer applications and iPad drawing programs.The subject matter of interest ranges from still lifes to landscapes, portraits of friends, his dogs, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Hockney has returned to painting portraits throughout his career. From 1968, and for the next few years, he painted portraits and double portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives just under life-size in a realistic style that adroitly captured the likenesses of his subjects. Hockney has repeatedly been drawn to the same subjects – his family, employees, artists Mo McDermott and Maurice Payne, various writers he has known, fashion designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark (Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71), curator Henry Geldzahler, art dealer Nicholas Wilder, George Lawson and his ballet dancer lover, Wayne Sleep, and also his romantic interests throughout the years, including Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. Perhaps more than all of these, Hockney has turned to his own figure year after year, creating over 300 self-portraits.

From 1999 to 2001 Hockney used a camera lucida for his research into art history as well as his own work in the studio. He created over 200 drawings of friends, family, and himself using this antique lens-based device.

In 2016, the Royal Academy exhibited Hockney's series entitled 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life which traveled to Ca' Pesaro in Venice, Italy, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2017 and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018. Hockney calls the paintings started in 2013 "twenty-hour exposures" because each sitting took six to seven hours on three consecutive days.

Hockney experimented with printmaking as early as a lithograph Self-Portrait in 1954 and worked in etchings during his time at RCA. In 1965, the print workshop Gemini G.E.L. approached him to create a series of lithographs with a Los Angeles theme. Hockney responded by creating The Hollywood Collection, a series of lithographs recreating the art collection of a Hollywood star, each piece depicting an imagined work of art within a frame. Hockney went on to produce many other portfolios with Gemini G.E.L. including Friends, The Weather Series, and Some New Prints. During the 1960s he produced several series of prints he thought of as 'graphic tales', including A Rake's Progress (1961–63) after Hogarth, Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy (1966) and Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969).

In 1973 Hockney began a fruitful collaboration with Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso's preferred printer. In his atelier, he adopted Crommelynck's trademark sugar lift, as well as a system of the master's own devising of imposing a wooden frame onto the plate to ensure colour separation. Their early work together included Artist and Model (1973–74) and Contrejour in the French Style (1974). In 1976–77 Hockney created The Blue Guitar, a suite of 20 etchings, each utilising Crommelynck's techniques and filled with references to Picasso. The frontispiece to the suite mentions Hockney's dual inspiration; "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The etchings refer to themes in a poem by Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar". It was published by Petersburg Press in October 1977. That year, Petersburg also published a book, in which the images were accompanied by the poem's text.

In the summer of 1978, David Hockney stayed 6 weeks with his friend the printer Ken Tyler at Tyler's studio in New York, Tyler Graphics Ltd. Tyler invited Hockney to try a new technique with liquid paper. The process is painting with the paper itself, so the artist had to do it himself by hand. Each image becomes a unique work between printmaking and painting. In 6 weeks, Hockney created a total of 29 artworks with a series of 17 sunflowers and swimming pools. Many of the works are very similar, differentiated by changes in colour choice and application of the colour. Some are solely coloured using paper pulp, while some use spray paint to achieve certain details.

Some of Hockney's other print portfolios include Home Made Prints (1986), Recent Etchings (1998) and Moving Focus (1984–1986), which contains lithographs related to A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan. A retrospective of his prints, including 'computer drawings' printed on fax machines and inkjet printers, was exhibited at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London 5 February – 11 May 2014 and Bowes Museum, County Durham 7 June – 28 September 2014, with an accompanying publication Hockney, Printmaker by Richard Lloyd.

In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages—which, in his early explorations within his personal photo albums, he referred to as "joiners" — first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially processed colour prints. Using Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney's major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some pieces are landscapes, such as Pearblossom Highway #2, others portraits, such as Kasmin 1982, and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.

Creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late 1960s that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses. He did not like these photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. On looking at the final composition, he realised it created a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the room. He began to work more with photography after this discovery, stopping painting for a while to pursue this new technique exclusively .

Over time, however, he discovered what he could not capture with a lens, saying: "Photography seems to be rather good at portraiture, or can be. But, it can't tell you about space, which is the essence of landscape. For me anyway. Even Ansel Adams can't quite prepare you for what Yosemite looks like when you go through that tunnel and you come out the other side." Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one-eyed' approach, he returned to painting.

In December 1985 Hockney used the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the screen. The resulting work was featured in a BBC series that profiled several artists. In 1999–2001, David's sister, Margaret, began experimenting with digital photography, scanning and computer printing, particularly making images of flowers scanning a small Japanese vase and fresh flowers. In 2003, she was experimenting with Photoshop, scanning summer flowers and building up images in layers which Margaret printed out on an A3 printer. In 2004, David went to stay with Margaret and she helped him scan his sketchbook of Yorkshire landscape and David soon began using a Wacom pad and pen directly into Photoshop.

Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the Brushes iPhone and iPad application, often sending them to his friends. In 2010 and 2011, Hockney visited Yosemite National Park to draw its landscape on his iPad. He used an iPad in designing a stained glass window at Westminster Abbey which celebrated the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Unveiled in September 2018, the Queen's Window is located in the north transept of the Abbey and features a hawthorn blossom scene which is set in Yorkshire.

From 2010 to 2014, Hockney created multi-camera movies using three to eighteen cameras to record a single scene. He filmed the landscape of Yorkshire in various seasons, jugglers and dancers, and his own exhibitions within the de Young Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Hockney's earlier photocollages influenced his shift to another medium, digital photography. He combined hundreds of photographs to create multi-viewpoint "photographic drawings" of groups of his friends in 2014. Hockney picked the process back up in 2017, this time using the more advanced Agisoft PhotoScan photogrammetric software which allowed him to stitch together and rearrange thousands of photos. The resulting images were printed out as massive photomurals and were exhibited at Pace Gallery and LACMA in 2018.

In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, which measures 15 by 40 feet (4.6 by 12.2 m), was hung in the Royal Academy's largest gallery in its annual Summer Exhibition. This work "is a monumental-scale view of a coppice in Hockney's native Yorkshire, between Bridlington and York. It was painted on 50 individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter." In 2008, he donated it to Tate in London, saying: "I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It's going to be here for a while. I don't want to give things I'm not too proud of... I thought this was a good painting because it's of England... it seems like a good thing to do." The painting was the subject of a BBC1 Imagine film documentary by Bruno Wollheim called David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2009) which followed Hockney as he worked outdoors over the preceding two years.

Hockney's first stage designs were for Ubu Roi at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1966, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England in 1975, and The Magic Flute for Glyndebourne in 1978. In 1980, he agreed to design sets and costumes for a 20th-century French triple bill at the Metropolitan Opera House with the title Parade. The works were Parade, a ballet with music by Erik Satie; Les mamelles de Tirésias, an opera with libretto by Guillaume Apollinaire and music by Francis Poulenc, and L'enfant et les sortilèges, an opera with libretto by Colette and music by Maurice Ravel. The reimagined set of L'enfant et les sortilèges from the 1983 exhibition Hockney Paints the Stage is a permanent installation at the Spalding House branch of the Honolulu Museum of Art. He designed sets for another triple bill of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps, Le rossignol, and Oedipus Rex for the Metropolitan Opera in 1981 as well as Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera in 1987, Puccini's Turandot in 1991 at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1992 at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1994, he designed costumes and scenery for twelve opera arias for the TV broadcast of Plácido Domingo's Operalia in Mexico City. Technical advances allowed him to become increasingly complex in model-making. At his studio he had a proscenium opening 6 feet (1.8 m) by 4 feet (1.2 m) in which he built sets in 1:8 scale. He also used a computerised setup that let him punch in and program lighting cues at will and synchronise them to a soundtrack of the music.

In 2017, Hockney was awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal on the occasion of the revival and restoration of his production for Turandot.

The majority of Hockney's theatre works and stage design studies are found in the collection of The David Hockney Foundation.

David Hockney has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions and over 500 group exhibitions. He had his first one-man show at Kasmin Limited when he was 26 in 1963, and by 1970 the Whitechapel Gallery in London had organised the first of several major retrospectives, which subsequently travelled to three European institutions. LACMA also hosted a retrospective exhibition in 1988 which travelled to The Met, New York, and Tate, London. In 2004, he was included in the cross-generational Whitney Biennial, where his portraits appeared in a gallery with those of a younger artist he had inspired, Elizabeth Peyton.

In October 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London organised one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks, and photocollages from over five decades. The collection ranged from his earliest self-portraits to work he completed in 2005. Hockney assisted in displaying the works and the exhibition, which ran until January 2007, was one of the gallery's most successful. In 2009, "David Hockney: Just Nature" attracted some 100,000 visitors at the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany.

From 21 January 2012 to 9 April 2012, the Royal Academy presented A Bigger Picture, which included more than 150 works, many of which take entire walls in the gallery's brightly lit rooms. The exhibition is dedicated to landscapes, especially trees and tree tunnels of his native Yorkshire. Works included oil paintings, watercolours, and drawings created on an iPad and printed on paper. Hockney said, in a 2012 interview, "It's about big things. You can make paintings bigger. We're also making photographs bigger, videos bigger, all to do with drawing." The exhibition drew more than 600,000 visitors in under 3 months. The exhibition moved to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain from 15 May to 30 September, and from there to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, between 27 October 2012 and 3 February 2013.

From 26 October 2013 to 30 January 2014 David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition was presented at the de Young Museum, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The largest solo exhibition Hockney has had, with 397 works of art in more than 18,000 square feet, was curated by Gregory Evans and included the only public showing of The Great Wall, developed during research for Secret Knowledge, and works from 1999 to 2013 in a variety of media from camera lucida drawings to watercolours, oil paintings, and digital works.

From 9 February to 29 May 2017 David Hockney was presented at the Tate Britain, becoming the most-visited exhibition in the gallery's history. The exhibition marked Hockney's 80th year and gathered together "an extensive selection of David Hockney's most famous works celebrating his achievements in painting, drawing, print, photography and video across six decades". The show then travelled to Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wildly popular retrospective landed among the top ten ticketed exhibitions in London and Paris for 2017 with over 4,000 visitors per day at the Tate and over 5,000 visitors per day in Paris.

After the blockbuster exhibitions in 2017 of the works of decades past, Hockney went on to display his newest paintings on hexagonal canvases and mural-size 3D photographic drawings at Pace Gallery in 2018. He revisited paintings of Garrowby Hill, the Grand Canyon, and Nichols Canyon Road, this time painting them on hexagonal canvases to enhance aspects of reverse perspective. In 2019, his early work featured in his native Yorkshire at The Hepworth Wakefield. In April–June 2022 an exhibition "Hockney's Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction" was held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and at the city's Heong Gallery.

Hockney came out as gay at the age of 23, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London. Britain decriminalised homosexual acts seven years later in the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Hockney has explored the nature of gay love in his work, such in as the painting We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman. In 1963 he painted two men together in the painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, one showering while the other washes his back. In the summer of 1966, while teaching at UCLA, he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings, and with whom he became romantically involved. Another of Hockney's romantic partners was the subject of his work was Gregory Evans; the two met in 1971 and began a relationship in 1974. While no longer romantically involved, they still work together, with Evans managing the David Hockney Studio. Hockney's current partner is longtime companion Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Also known as JP, he also works with Hockney in his studio as his chief assistant.

On the morning of 18 March 2013, Hockney's 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died as a result of drinking drain cleaner at Hockney's Bridlington studio; he had also earlier drunk alcohol and taken cocaine, ecstasy and temazepam. Elliott was a first- and second-team player for Bridlington Rugby Club. It was reported that Hockney's partner drove Elliott to Scarborough General Hospital where he later died. The inquest returned a verdict of death by misadventure and Hockney was never implicated. In November 2015 Hockney sold his house in Bridlington, a five-bedroomed former guest house, for £625,000, cutting all his remaining ties with the town.

He holds a California Medical Marijuana Verification Card, which enables him to buy cannabis for medical purposes. He has used hearing aids since 1979, but realised he was going deaf long before that. As of 2018, he kept fit by spending half an hour in the swimming pool each morning, and could stand for six hours at the easel.

Hockney has synaesthetic associations between sound, colour and shape.

In 1967, Hockney's painting, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990 but declined, before accepting an Order of Merit in January 2012. He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Progress medal in 1988 and the Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and awarded The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography (DGPh). He is a Royal Academician. In 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, an honour restricted to 24 members at any one time for their contributions to the arts and sciences.

He was a Distinguished Honoree of the National Arts Association, Los Angeles, in 1991 and received the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles, in 1993. He was appointed to the board of trustees of the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust, New York in 1992 and was given a Foreign Honorary Membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997. In 2003, Hockney was awarded the Lorenzo de' Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy.

Commissioned by The Other Art Fair, a November 2011 poll of 1,000 British painters and sculptors declared him Britain's most influential artist of all time. In 2012, Hockney was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.

He is an honorary member of the Printmakers Council.

On 21 June 2006, Hockney's painting The Splash sold for £2.6 million. It was offered for auction again on 11 February 2020, with an estimate of £20–30 million and sold, to an unknown buyer, for £23.1 million. His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 canvases that combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.

Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a 12-foot-long acrylic that depicts the collector Betty Freeman standing by her pool in a long hot-pink dress, sold for $7.9 million at Christie's in New York in 2008, the top lot of the sale and a record price for a Hockney. This was topped in 2016 when his Woldgate Woods landscape made £9.4 million at auction.

The record was broken again in 2018 with the sale of Piscine de Medianoche (Paper Pool 30) for $11.74 million and then doubled in the same Sotheby's auction when Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica sold for $28.5 million.

On 15 November 2018, David Hockney's 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's for $90.3 million with fees, surpassing the previous auction record for a living artist of $58.4 million, held by Jeff Koons for one of his Balloon Dog sculptures. He had originally sold this painting for $20,000 in 1972.

In the 2001 television programme and book Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old Masters used camera obscura as well as camera lucida and lens techniques that projected the image of the subject onto the surface of the painting. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually from Northern Europe to Italy, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in the Renaissance and later periods of art. He published his conclusions in the 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which was revised in 2006.

Like his father, Hockney was a conscientious objector, and worked as a medical orderly in hospitals during his National Service, 1957–1959.

Hockney was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1979. He serves on the advisory board of the political magazine Standpoint, and contributed original sketches for its launch edition, in June 2008, as well as agreeing to allow Standpoint to publish his previous views and pictures over the years.

He is a staunch pro-tobacco campaigner and was invited to guest-edit BBC Radio's Today programme on 29 December 2009 in which he aired his views on the subject. In 2013 he wrote a foreword and provided illustrations for a book by John Staddon, Unlucky Strike.

In October 2010, he and a hundred other artists signed an open letter to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, protesting against cutbacks in the arts.
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Henry Howard (31 January 1769 †– 5 October 1847) was an English historical and portrait painter.

He trained as a painter in Rome, notably under John Flaxman, and returned to England in 1794 after making a name for himself with his painting The Death of Cain.

In 1808 he became a member of the Academy and in 1811 secretary and professor of painting at the Academy. He died in Oxford on 5 October 1847.

He combined appealing technique with a delicate and poetic feeling.

His son Frank Howard, also a painter and draughtsman (born 1805 in London, died 1866 in Liverpool), published his father's lectures on painting (London 1848, 2 vols.).
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Tom Hunter (born 1965) is a London-based British artist working in photography and film. His photographs often reference and reimagine classical paintings. He was the first photographer to have a one-man show at the National Gallery, London.

Hunter has shown work internationally in exhibitions, his work is held in a number of public collections and he has had four books published. He has won various awards including an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.

Hunter was born in Bournemouth. He studied at the London College of Printing and gained an MA from the Royal College of Art in London.

His work has specialised in documenting life in Hackney, depicting local issues and sensationalist news headlines with compositions borrowed from the Old Masters. For instance, his photograph of a squatter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, references Johannes Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. This photograph won the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 1998. Of the photograph, which was shot with a large-format camera and printed using the Ilfochrome process, Hunter said: "I just wanted to take a picture showing the dignity of squatter life – a piece of propaganda to save my neighbourhood....The great thing is, the picture got a dialogue going with the council – and we managed to save the houses."

While praising both the National Gallery exhibition as a whole and several of the photographs within it, Tim Adams criticized a staged photograph, comparing it unfavorably with the work of Richard Billingham or Graham Smith.

In 2010 Hunter screened A Palace for Us, a film he made about the elderly residents of public buildings in Woodberry Down, Manor House, London. Jonathan Jones described it as a 'magical' work of contemporary art that chronicled the postwar ambition to provide housing for the working class.

He works at the Photography and the Archive Research Centre in London.

In 2019 Hunter showed a series of photographs at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, of taxi drivers from various other countries that had made Hastings their home, along with works from the museum's collection.
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Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (born Gottfried Kniller; 8 August 1646 – 19 October 1723), was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to English and British monarchs from Charles II to George I. His major works include The Chinese Convert (1687; Royal Collection, London); a series of four portraits of Isaac Newton painted at various junctures of the latter's life; a series of ten reigning European monarchs, including King Louis XIV of France; over 40 "kit-cat portraits" of members of the Kit-Cat Club; and ten "beauties" of the court of William III, to match a similar series of ten of Charles II's mistresses painted by Kneller's predecessor as court painter, Sir Peter Lely.

Kneller was born Gottfried Kniller in the Free City of Lübeck, the son of Zacharias Kniller, a portrait painter. Kneller studied in Leiden, but became a pupil of Ferdinand Bol and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn in Amsterdam. He then travelled with his brother John Zacharias Kneller, who was an ornamental painter, to Rome and Venice in the early 1670s, painting historical subjects and portraits in the studio of Carlo Maratti, and later moved to Hamburg.

The brothers came to England in 1676, and won the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth. He was introduced to, and painted a portrait of, Charles II.

In England, Kneller concentrated almost entirely on portraiture. In the spirit of enterprise, he founded a studio which churned out portraits on an almost industrial scale, relying on a brief sketch of the face with details added to a formulaic model, aided by the fashion for gentlemen to wear full wigs. His portraits set a pattern that was followed until William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds.

Nevertheless, he established himself as a leading portrait artist in England. When Sir Peter Lely died in 1680, Kneller was appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to the Crown by Charles II.

For about 20 years (c. 1682–1702) he lived at No. 16-17 The Great Piazza, Covent Garden.

In the 1690s, Kneller painted the Hampton Court Beauties depicting the most glamorous ladies-in-waiting of the Royal Court for which he received, in 1692, his knighthood from William III. In 1695, he received, in the presence of the king, an honorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Oxford. In 1700, he was created a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire by Emperor Leopold I. He produced a series of "Kit-cat" portraits of 48 leading politicians and men of letters, members of the Kit-Cat Club.

Created a baronet by King George I on 24 May 1715, he was also head of the Kneller Academy of Painting and Drawing from 1711 until 1716 in Great Queen Street, London, which counted such artists as Thomas Gibson amongst its founding directors. His paintings were praised by Whig members including John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope.

On the landing in Horsham Museum in West Sussex hang works of art from the Museum's extensive painting collection, featuring a large 18th-century portrait of Charles Eversfield and his wife, of Denne Park House.

He married a widow, Susanna Grave, on 23 January 1704 at St Bride's Church, London. She was the daughter of the Reverend John Cawley, Archdeacon of Lincoln and Rector of Henley-on-Thames, and the granddaughter of regicide William Cawley. The couple had no children.

Kneller died of fever in 1723 at Great Queen Street and his remains were interred at Twickenham. He had been a churchwarden at St Mary's, Twickenham, when the 14th-century nave collapsed in 1713 and was active in the plans for the church's reconstruction by John James. His widow was buried at Twickenham on 11 December 1729.

A memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey. Kneller's will gave a pension of £100 a year to his assistant Edward Byng and entrusted Byng with seeing that all unfinished work was completed. Byng also inherited the drawings in Kneller's studio. Kneller and his wife had no children together. Most of his fortune was inherited by his grandson, Godfrey Kneller Huckle, who was the son of Agnes Huckle, Kneller's illegitimate daughter by Mrs Voss, and who took his grandfather's surname (Kneller) as a condition of his inheritance.

The site of the house Kneller built in 1709 in Whitton, near Twickenham, became occupied by the mid-19th century Kneller Hall, home of the Royal Military School of Music.

As to thinking better or worse of mankind from experience, some cunning people will not be satisfied unless they have put men to the test, as they think. There is a very good story told of Sir Godfrey Kneller, in his character of a Justice of the peace. A gentleman brought his servant before him, upon an accusation of having stolen some money from him; but it having come out that he had laid it purposely in the servant's way, in order to try his honesty, Sir Godfrey sent the master to prison. (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)

In his hometown Lübeck there are works to be seen in the St. Annen Museum and in Saint Catherine Church. His former works at St. Mary's Church were destroyed by the Bombing of Lübeck 1942. A large oil portrait (84" x 55") of James VII of Scotland (King James II of England) hangs on the main staircase of private members' Club, The Caledonian Club, in Belgravia, London.

A portrait of Queen Anne that belongs to Trinity Hospital in Retford, Nottinghamshire has been attributed to Kneller by the auctioneers Phillips – though it is unsigned. The hospital has a strong connection with Queen Anne, the founder being a first cousin of her grandmother. The portrait was restored and cleaned in 1999
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Gwendolen Mary John (22 June 1876 – 18 September 1939) was a Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings, mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, are rendered in a range of closely related tones. Although she was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother Augustus John and her lover Auguste Rodin, her reputation has grown steadily since her death.

Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, the second of four children of Edwin William John and his wife Augusta (née Smith). Gwen's elder brother was Thornton John; her younger siblings were Augustus and Winifred. Edwin John was a solicitor whose dour temperament cast a chill over his family, and Augusta was often absent from the children owing to ill health, leaving her two sisters — stern Salvationists — to take her place in the household. Augusta was an amateur watercolourist, and both parents encouraged the children's interest in literature and art.

Her mother died when Gwen was eight years of age. Regarding her mother's death and the loss of her influence, her brother Augustus later wrote: "My mother would no doubt have been helpful, but she died when I was a small child, after, I fear, a very tearful existence."

Following their mother's premature death in 1884, the family moved to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where the early education of Gwen and her sister Winifred was provided by governesses. The siblings often went to the coast of Tenby to sketch. John said that she would make "rapid drawings of beached gulls, shells and fish on stray pieces of paper, or sometimes in the frontispiece of the book she was reading." Although she painted and drew from an early age, Gwen John's earliest surviving work dates from her nineteenth year.

From 1895 to 1898, she studied at the Slade School of Art, where the program was modeled after the French atelier method (various levels of student working under a master artist). It was the only art school in the United Kingdom that allowed female students, although there was generally no mixing of men and women on the grounds, in classes, or in corridors. Like her younger brother, Augustus, who had begun his studies there in 1894, she studied figure drawing under Henry Tonks. During this period, she and Augustus shared living quarters, and further reduced their expenses by subsisting on a diet of nuts and fruit. She developed a close relationship with the woman who would become her brother's wife, Ida Nettleship. At this time, she also had a relationship with another of her brother's friends, Arthur Ambrose McEvoy, which turned out to be an unhappy one. Good friends also included Ursula Tyrwhitt and Gwen Salmond. John won the Melvill Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition in her final year at Slade.

Slade students were encouraged to copy the works of old masters in London museums. John's early paintings such as Portrait of Mrs. Atkinson, Young Woman with a Violin, and Interior with Figures are intimist works painted in a traditional style characterised by subdued colour and transparent glazes.

Even as a student, Augustus's brilliant draughtsmanship and personal glamour made him a celebrity, and stood in contrast to Gwen's quieter gifts and reticent demeanour. Augustus greatly admired his sister's work but believed she neglected her health, and he urged her to take a "more athletic attitude to life". She refused his advice, and demonstrated throughout her life a marked disregard for her physical well-being.

In 1898 she made her first visit to Paris with two friends from the Slade, and while there she studied under James McNeill Whistler at his school, Académie Carmen. She returned to London in 1899 and exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club (NEAC). With Arthur Ambrose McEvoy becoming engaged to Mary Edwards at the end of 1900, "an awkward period ensued with Gwen living at the McEvoy family home in Bayswater", where "she had continued living", "while Ambrose and Mary moved down to Shrivenham in Oxfordshire" c. 1903.

In late 1903, she travelled to France with her friend Dorelia McNeill (who would later become Augustus John's second wife and whose daughter, Vivien John, would also become an artist). Upon landing in Bordeaux, they set off on a walking tour with their art equipment in hand, intending to reach Rome. Sleeping in fields and living on money earned along the way by selling portrait sketches, they made it as far as Toulouse.

In 1904, the two went to Paris, where John found work as an artist's model, mostly for women artists. In that same year, she began modelling for the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and became his lover after being introduced by Hilda Flodin. Rodin used John as a model for a muse in his unfinished monument to Whistler. Her devotion to 35-years older Rodin, who was the most famous artist of his time, continued unabated for the next ten years, as documented in her thousands of fervent letters to him. John was given to fierce attachments to both men and women that were sometimes disturbing to them, and Rodin, despite his genuine feeling for her, eventually resorted to the use of concièrges and secretaries to keep her at a distance.

During her years in Paris she met many of the leading artistic personalities of her time, including Matisse, Picasso, Brâncuși, and Rainer Maria Rilke, but the new developments in the art of her time had little effect on her, and she worked in solitude. In 1910 she found living quarters in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where she would remain for the rest of her life. As her affair with Rodin drew to a close, John sought comfort in Catholicism, and around 1913 she was received into the Church. Her notebooks of the period include meditations and prayers; she wrote of her desire to be "God's little artist" and to "become a saint." In an often-quoted letter of ca. 1912, she wrote: "As to whether I have anything worth expressing that is apart from the question. I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life".

She stopped exhibiting at the NEAC in 1911, but gained an important patron in John Quinn, an American art collector who, from 1910 until his death in 1924, purchased the majority of the works that Gwen John sold. Quinn's support freed John from having to work as a model, and enabled her to devote herself to her work. Although she participated in exhibitions fairly regularly, her perfectionism produced in her a marked ambivalence toward exhibiting. She wrote in 1911: "I paint a good deal, but I don't often get a picture done—that requires, for me, a very long time of a quiet mind, and never to think of exhibitions." In 1913, one of her paintings was included in the seminal Armory Show in New York, which Quinn assisted in organising.

Her attitude toward her work was both self-effacing and confident. After viewing an exhibition of watercolours by Cézanne she remarked: "These are very good, but I prefer my own."

About 1913, as an obligation to the Dominican Sisters of Charity at Meudon, she began a series of painted portraits of Mère Marie Poussepin (1653–1744), the founder of their order. These paintings, based on a prayer card, established a format—the female figure in three-quarter length seated pose—which became characteristic of her mature style. She painted numerous variants on such subjects as Young Woman in a Spotted Blue Dress, Girl Holding a Cat, and The Convalescent. The identities of most of her models are unknown.

In Meudon John lived in solitude, except for her cats. In an undated letter she wrote, "I should like to go and live somewhere where I met nobody I know till I am so strong that people and things could not effect me beyond reason." She wished also to avoid family ties ("I think the family has had its day. We don't go to Heaven in families now but one by one") and her decision to live in France after 1903 may have been the result of her desire to escape the overpowering personality of her famous brother, although, according to art historian David Fraser Jenkins, "there were few occasions when she did anything against her will, and she was the more ruthless and dominating of the two.

John exhibited in Paris for the first time in 1919 at the Salon d'Automne, and exhibited regularly until the mid-1920s, after which time she became increasingly reclusive and painted less. She had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime, at the New Chenil Galleries in London in 1926. In that same year she purchased a bungalow in Meudon. In December 1926, distraught after the death of her old friend Rilke, she met and sought religious guidance from her neighbor, the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also met Maritain's sister-in-law, Véra Oumançoff, with whom she formed her last romantic relationship, which lasted until 1930.

John's last dated work is a drawing of 20 March 1933, and no evidence suggests that she drew or painted during the remainder of her life. On 10 September 1939, she wrote her will and then travelled to Dieppe, where she collapsed and was hospitalized. She died there on 18 September 1939 and was buried in Janval Cemetery. According to Paul Johnson in Art: A New History, "she appears to have starved to death".

In 1916, John wrote in a letter: "I think a picture ought to be done in 1 sitting or at most. For that one must paint a lot of canvases probably and waste them." Her surviving oeuvre is comparatively small, comprising 158 known oil paintings which rarely exceed 24 inches in height or width. The majority are portraits, but she also painted still lifes, interiors and a few landscapes. She wrote, "...a cat or a man, its the same thing ... its an affair of volumes ... the object is of no importance." Although she lived in France from the age of 28 until she died, her work always displayed a British sensibility.

Her early paintings, such as the Portrait of the Artist's Sister Winifred (ca. 1897–98) and Dorelia in a Black Dress (1903–04), are painted using thin glazes in the traditional manner of the old masters. Beginning with her series of paintings of Mère Poussepin (ca. 1913), her style is characterised by thicker paint applied in small, mosaic-like touches. It became her habit to paint the same subject repeatedly. Her portraits are usually of anonymous female sitters seated in a three-quarter length format, with their hands in their laps. One of her models, Jeanne Foster, wrote of John: "She takes down my hair and does it like her own ... she has me sit as she does, and I feel the absorption of her personality as I sit".

John's drawings number in the thousands. In addition to studio work, she made many sketches and watercolours of women and children in church. Unlike her oil paintings of solitary women, these sketches frequently depict their subjects from behind, and in groups. She also made many sketches of her cats. Aside from two etchings she drew in 1910, she made no prints.

Her notebooks and letters contain numerous personal formulae for observing nature, painting a portrait, designating colors by a system of numbers, and the like. Their meaning is often obscure, but they reveal John's predilection for order and the lasting influence of Whistler, whose teaching emphasised systematic preparation.

Gwen John's art, in its quietude and its subtle colour relationships, stands in contrast to her brother's far more vivid and assertive work. Though she was once overshadowed by her popular brother, critical opinion now tends to view Gwen as the more talented of the two. Augustus himself had predicted this reversal, saying "In 50 years' time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John."

Throughout her life John was attracted to people of both sexes. As a student she had an affair with fellow artist Ambrose McEvoy. Although Auguste Rodin was her great love, she had a number of same-sex relationships. While at Slade she developed a passion for an unnamed woman, which her brother Augustus describes in his autobiography Chiaroscuro; and while walking to Paris with Dorelia McNeill, she developed a passion for a married girl, who then followed them to Paris. It has been suggested that John had romantic feelings for McNeill. Rodin, who had a sexual relationship with his assistant Hilda Flodin, drew erotic drawings of Flodin and John together. The German painter Ida Gerhardi fell in love with John but it was not reciprocated. John's last passion was Véra Oumançoff, for whom she developed an obsession, much to the discomfort of Véra.
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Sir Thomas Lawrence PRA FRS (13 April 1769 – 7 January 1830) was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at the Bear Hotel in the Market Square. At age ten, having moved to Bath, he was supporting his family with his pastel portraits. At 18, he went to London and soon established his reputation as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1790. He stayed at the top of his profession until his death, aged 60, in 1830.

Self-taught, he was a brilliant draughtsman and known for his gift of capturing a likeness, as well as his virtuoso handling of paint. He became an associate of the Royal Academy in 1791, a full member in 1794, and president in 1820.

In 1810, he acquired the generous patronage of the Prince Regent, was sent abroad to paint portraits of allied leaders for the Waterloo chamber at Windsor Castle, and is particularly remembered as the Romantic portraitist of the Regency.

Lawrence's love affairs were not happy (his tortuous relationships with Sally and Maria Siddons were the subjects of several books) and, in spite of his success, he spent most of life deep in debt. He never married. At his death, he was the most fashionable portrait painter in Europe. His reputation waned during Victorian times, but has since been partially restored.

Childhood and early career
Lawrence was born at 6 Redcross Street, Bristol, the youngest surviving child of Thomas Lawrence, a supervisor of excise, and Lucy Read, a clergyman's daughter. They had 16 children, but only five survived infancy: Lawrence's brother Andrew became a clergyman; William had a career in the army; and sisters Lucy and Anne married a solicitor and a clergyman (Lawrence's nephews included Andrew Bloxam). Soon after Thomas was born, his father decided to become an innkeeper and took over the White Lion Inn and next-door American Coffee House in Broad Street, Bristol. But the venture did not prosper, and in 1773 Lawrence senior removed his family from Bristol and took over the tenancy of the Black Bear Inn in Devizes, a favourite stopping place for the London gentry making their annual trip to take the waters at Bath.

It was during the family's six-year stay at the Black Bear Inn that Lawrence senior began to make use of his son's precocious talents for drawing and reciting poetry. Visitors would be greeted with the words "Gentlemen, here's my son—will you have him recite from the poets, or take your portraits?" Among those who listened to a recitation from Tom, or Tommy as he was called, was actor David Garrick.

Lawrence's formal schooling was limited to two years at The Fort, a school in Bristol, when he was six to eight; and a little tuition in French and Latin from a dissenting minister. He also became accomplished in dancing, fencing, boxing and billiards. By age ten his fame had spread sufficiently for him to receive a mention in Daines Barrington's Miscellanies as "without the most distant instruction from anyone, capable of copying historical pictures in a masterly style". But once again Lawrence senior failed as a landlord; in 1779, he was declared bankrupt and the family moved to Bath. From this point on, Lawrence supported his parents with his portrait work.

The family settled at 2 Alfred Street in Bath, and the young Lawrence established himself as a portraitist in pastels. His oval portraits, for which he was soon charging three guineas, were about 12 inches by 10 inches (30 by 25 centimetres), and usually portrayed a half-length. His sitters included the Duchess of Devonshire, Sarah Siddons, Sir Henry Harpur (of Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, who offered to send Lawrence to Italy, but Lawrence senior refused to part with his son), Warren Hastings, and Sir Elijah Impey. Talented, charming and attractive (and surprisingly modest) Lawrence was popular with Bath residents and visitors. Artists William Hoare and Mary Hartley gave him encouragement. Wealthy people allowed him to study their collections of paintings, and Lawrence's drawing of a copy of Raphael's Transfiguration was awarded a silver-gilt palette and a prize of 5 guineas by the Society of Arts in London.

"Always in love and always in debt"
Sometime before his eighteenth birthday in 1787 Lawrence arrived in London, taking lodgings in Leicester Square, near to Joshua Reynolds' studio. He was introduced to Reynolds, who advised him to study nature rather than the Old Masters. Lawrence set up a studio at 41 Jermyn Street and installed his parents in a house in Greek Street. He exhibited several works in the 1787 Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset House, and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy but did not stay long, abandoning the drawing of classical statues to concentrate on his portraiture.

At the Royal Academy exhibition of 1788 he was represented by five portraits in pastels and one in oils, a medium he quickly mastered. Between 1787 and his death in 1830 he missed only two of the annual exhibitions: in 1809, protesting how his paintings had been displayed; and in 1819, because he was abroad. In 1789 he exhibited 13 portraits, mostly in oil, including one of William Linley and one of Lady Cremorne, his first attempt at a full-length portrait. They received favourable comments in the press, with one critic referring to him as "the Sir Joshua of futurity not far off". Aged just 20, Lawrence received his first royal commission, a summons arriving from Windsor Palace to paint the portraits of Queen Charlotte and Princess Amelia.

The queen found Lawrence presumptuous (although he made a good impression on the princesses and ladies-in-waiting) and she did not like the finished portrait, which remained in Lawrence's studio until his death. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790, however, it received critical acclaim. Also shown that year was another of Lawrence's most famous portraits, that of actress Elizabeth Farren, soon to be the Countess of Derby, "completely Elizabeth Farren: arch, spirited, elegant and engaging", according to one newspaper.

In 1791 Lawrence was elected an associate of the Royal Academy and the following year, on the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, King George III appointed him "painter-in-ordinary to his majesty". His reputation was established, and he moved to a studio in Old Bond Street. In 1794 he became a full member of the Royal Academy.

Although commissions were pouring in, Lawrence was in financial difficulties. His debts stayed with him for the rest of life. He narrowly avoided bankruptcy, had to be bailed out by wealthy sitters and friends, and died insolvent. Biographers have never been able to discover the source of his debts; he was a prodigiously hard worker (once referring in a letter to his portrait painting as "mill-horse business") and did not appear to live extravagantly. Lawrence himself said: "I have never been extravagant nor profligate in the use of money. Neither gaming, horses, curricles, expensive entertainments, nor secret sources of ruin from vulgar licentiousness have swept it from me". This has generally been accepted, with biographers blaming his financial problems on his generosity towards his family and others, his inability to keep accounts (in spite of advice from his friend, painter and diarist Joseph Farington), and his magnificent but costly collection of Old Master drawings.

Another source of unhappiness in Lawrence's life was his romantic entanglement with two of Sarah Siddons' daughters. He fell in love first with Sally, then transferred his affections to her sister Maria, then broke with Maria and turned to Sally again. Both sisters had fragile health; Maria died in 1798, on her deathbed extracting a promise from her sister never to marry Lawrence. Sally kept her promise and refused to see Lawrence again; she died in 1803. Lawrence continued on friendly terms with their mother and painted several portraits of her. He never married. In later years, two women provided him with companionship — friends Elizabeth Croft, and Isabella Wolff, who met Lawrence when she sat for her portrait in 1803. Isabella was married to Danish consul Jens Wolff, but she separated from him in 1810. Sir Michael Levey suggests that people may have wondered if Lawrence was the father of her son Herman.

Lawrence's departures from portraiture were very rare. In the early 1790s he completed two history pictures: Homer reciting his poems, a small picture of the poet in a pastoral setting; and Satan summoning his legions, a giant canvas illustrating lines from John Milton's Paradise Lost. Boxer John Jackson posed for the naked body of Satan; the face is that of Sarah Siddons' brother, John Philip Kemble.

Lawrence's parents died within a few months of each other in 1797. He gave up his house in Picadilly, where he had moved from Old Bond Street, to set up his studio in the family home in Greek Street. By now, to keep up with the demand for replicas of his portraits, he was using studio assistants, most notable of whom were William Etty and George Henry Harlow.

The early years of the 19th century saw Lawrence's portrait practice continue to flourish. Amongst his sitters were major political figures such as Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville and William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, whose wife Lady Caroline Lamb he also painted. The king commissioned portraits of his daughter-in-law Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales; and his granddaughter Charlotte. Lawrence stayed at Montague House, the princess's residence in Blackheath, while he was painting the portraits and thus became implicated in the "delicate investigation" into Caroline's morals. He swore an affidavit that although he had on occasion been alone with her, the door had never been locked or bolted and he had "not the least objection for all the world to have heard or seen what took place". Expertly defended by Spencer Perceval, he was exonerated.

"Pictorial chronicler of the Regency"
By the time the Prince of Wales was made regent in 1811, Lawrence was acknowledged as the country's foremost portrait painter. Through one of his sitters, Lord Charles Stewart, he met the Prince Regent, who became his most important patron. As well as portraits of himself, the prince commissioned portraits of allied leaders the Duke of Wellington, Field-Marshal von Blücher and Count Platov, who sat for Lawrence at his new house at 65 Russell Square. (The house was demolished in the early 20th century to make way for the Imperial Hotel.) The private sitting-room of Sir Thomas Lawrence shows Lawrence at 65 Russell Square, surrounded by casts of classical sculpture. The prince also had plans for Lawrence to travel abroad and paint foreign royalty and leaders, and as a preliminary he was given a knighthood on 22 April 1815. Napoleon's return from Elba put these plans on hold, although Lawrence did make a visit to Paris, where his friend Lord Charles Stewart was ambassador, and saw the art that Napoleon had looted from Italy, including Raphael's Transfiguration, the painting he had reproduced for his silver-gilt palette as a boy.

In 1817 the prince commissioned Lawrence to paint a portrait of his daughter Princess Charlotte, who was pregnant with her first child. Charlotte died in childbirth; Lawrence completed the portrait and presented it to her husband Prince Leopold at Claremont on his birthday, as agreed. The princess's obstetrician, Sir Richard Croft, who later shot himself, was the half-brother of Lawrence's friend Elizabeth Croft, and for her Lawrence drew a sketch of Croft in his coffin.

Eventually, in September 1818, Lawrence was able to make his postponed trip to the continent to paint the allied leaders, first at Aachen and then at the conference of Vienna, for what would become the Waterloo Chamber series, housed in Windsor Castle. His sitters included Tsar Alexander, Emperor Francis I of Austria, the King of Prussia, Field-Marshal Prince Schwarzenberg, Archduke Charles of Austria and Henriette his wife, Lady Selina Caroline, wife of the Count of Clam-Martinic and a young Napoleon II, as well as various French and Prussian ministers. In May 1819, still under orders from the Prince Regent, he left Vienna for Rome to paint Pope Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi.

President of the Royal Academy
Lawrence arrived back in London 30 March 1820 to find that the president of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, had died. That very evening Lawrence was voted the new president, a position he would hold until his death 10 years later. George III had died in January; Lawrence was granted a place in the procession for the coronation of George IV. On 28 February 1822 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society "for his eminence in art". The royal commissions continued during the 1820s, including one for a portrait of the king's sister Sophia, and one of Sir Walter Scott (along with Jane Austen, one of Lawrence's favourite authors), as well as one to paint King Charles X of France for the Waterloo series, for which Lawrence made a trip to Paris, taking Herman Wolff with him. Lawrence acquired another important patron in Robert Peel, who commissioned the painter to do portraits of his family as well a portrait of George Canning. Two of Lawrence's most famous portraits of children were painted during the 1820s: that of Emily and Laura Calmady, daughters of Charles Calmady, and that of Master Charles William Lambton, painted for his father Lord Durham for 600 guineas and known as The Red Boy. The latter portrait attracted much praise when it was exhibited in Paris in 1827. One of the artist's last commissions was of future prime-minister the Earl of Aberdeen. Fanny Kemble, a niece of Sarah Siddons, was one of his last sitters (for a drawing).

Lawrence died suddenly on 7 January 1830, just months after his friend Isabella Wolff. A few days previously he had experienced chest pains but had continued working and was eagerly anticipating a stay with his sister at Rugby, when he collapsed and died during a visit from his friends Elizabeth Croft and Archibald Keightley. After a post-mortem examination, doctors concluded that the artist's death had been caused by ossification of the aorta and vessels of the heart. Lawrence's first biographer, D. E. Williams suggested that this in itself was not enough to cause death and it was his doctors' over-zealous bleeding and leeching that killed him. Lawrence was buried on 21 January in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral. Amongst the mourners was J. M. W. Turner who painted a sketch of the funeral from memory.

Lawrence was famed for the length of time he took to finish some of his paintings (Isabella Wolff waited twelve years for her portrait to be completed) and, at his death, his studio contained a large number of unfinished works. Some were completed by his assistants and other artists, some were sold as they were. In his will Lawrence left instructions to offer, at a price much below their worth, his collection of Old Master drawings to first George IV, then the trustees of the British Museum, then Robert Peel and the Earl of Dudley. None of them accepted the offer and the collection was split up and auctioned; many of the drawings later found their way into the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. After Lawrence's creditors had been paid, there was no money left, although a memorial exhibition at the British Institution raised £3,000 which was given to his nieces.

Lawrence's friends asked Scottish poet Thomas Campbell to write the artist's biography, but he passed on the task to D.E. Williams, whose two rather inaccurate volumes were published in 1831. It was nearly 70 years later, in 1900, before another biography of Lawrence appeared by Lord Ronald Gower. In 1913, Sir Walter Armstrong, who was not a great admirer of Lawrence, published a monograph. The 1950s saw the publication of two further works: Douglas Goldring's Regency portrait painter, and Kenneth Garlick's catalogue of Lawrence's paintings (a further edition was published in 1989). Sir Michael Levey, curator of the National Portrait Gallery's 1979–80 Lawrence exhibition, produced books on the artist in 1979 and 2005. Lawrence's entanglements with the Siddons family has been the subject of three books (by Oswald Knapp, André Maurois, and Naomi Royde-Smith) and a recent radio play.

Lawrence's reputation as an artist fell during the Victorian era. Critic and artist Roger Fry did something to restore it in the 1930s, when he described Lawrence as having a "consummate mastery over the means of artistic expression with an unerring hand and eye". At one time Lawrence was more popular in the United States and France than in Britain; and some of his best known portraits, including those of Elizabeth Farren, Sarah Barrett Moulton (known to her family as Pinkie) and Charles Lambton (the "Red Boy") found their way to the United States during the early-20th-century enthusiasm there for English portraits. Sir Michael Levey acknowledges that Lawrence is still dismissed by some art historians: "He was a highly original artist, quite unexpected on the English scene: self-taught, self-absorbed in perfecting his own personal style, and in effect self-destructing, since he left behind no significant followers or creative influence. Leaving aside Sargent, his sole successor has been not in painting, but in fashionable, virtuoso photography."

The most extensive collections of Lawrence's work can be found in the Royal Collections and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Tate Britain, the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery house smaller collections of his work in London. There are a few examples of his work in the Holburne Museum of Art and the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, and in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. In the United States, The Huntington Library houses Pinkie, and Lawrence's portraits of Elizabeth Farren, Lady Harriet Maria Conyngham, and the Calmady children are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Europe, the Musée du Louvre has a few examples of Lawrence's work, and the Vatican Pinacoteca has a swagger portrait of George IV (presented by the king himself) as almost its only British work.

In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work. The director of the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne, was quoted in the Guardian describing Lawrence as "…a huge figure. But a huge figure who we believe deserves a great deal more attention. He is one of the great painters of the last 250 years and one of the great stars of portraiture on a European stage." In December 2018, a portrait of Lady Selina Meade (1797–1872), who married the Count of Clam-Martinic, painted by Lawrence in Vienna in 1819, sold for £2.29 million at auction, a record for the artist.
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Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, PRA (3 December 1830 – 25 January 1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular, and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.

Leighton was the bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage became extinct upon his death.

Leighton was born in Scarborough to Augusta Susan and Dr. Frederic Septimus Leighton (1799–1892), a medical doctor. Leighton's grandfather, Sir James Boniface Leighton (1769–1843), had been the primary physician to two Russian tsars - Alexander I and Nicholas I - and their families, and amassed a fortune while in their service. Leighton’s career was always cushioned by this family wealth, with his father paying him an allowance throughout his life. He had two sisters, one of them being Alexandra who was Robert Browning's biographer. He was educated at University College School, London. He then received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17, in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and drew his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper — the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. When he was 24 he was in Florence; he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. From 1855 to 1859 he lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

Travel was an important part of Leighton’s life from childhood. By his late teens, he was living with his family in Frankfurt, Germany and had already visited many of Europe’s major cities, including Florence and Rome; places which he would return to on a great many occasions over the next decades. By his late twenties, extended periods had been spent living in Rome and then Paris and Leighton had made his first trip outside Europe, travelling to north Africa in 1857. Once settled in London, he continued to make extensive trips on an annual basis until shortly before his death. The countries that Leighton visited on at least one occasion include Austria, Algeria, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, The Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Syria and Turkey.

In 1860, he moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He designed Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb for Robert Browning in the English Cemetery, Florence in 1861. In 1864 he became an associate of the Royal Academy and in 1878 he became its President (1878–96). His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture. American art critic Earl Shinn claimed at the time that "Except Leighton, there is scarce any one capable of putting up a correct frescoed figure in the archway of the Kensington Museum." His paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition.

He was the first President of the Committee commissioning the Survey of London which documented the capital's principal buildings and public art.

Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet, of Holland Park Road in the Parish of St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in the County of Middlesex, eight years later. He was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the 1896 New Year Honours. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

Leighton remained a bachelor; rumours of him having an illegitimate child with one of his models, in addition to the supposition that Leighton may have been a homosexual, continue to be debated. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton in letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters lack reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

On his death his barony was extinguished after existing for only a day; this is a record in the Peerage. His house in Holland Park, London has been turned into a museum, the Leighton House Museum. It contains many of his drawings and paintings, as well as some of his former art collection including works by Old Masters and his contemporaries such as a painting dedicated to Leighton by Sir John Everett Millais. The house also features many of Leighton's inspirations, including his collection of Iznik tiles. Its centrepiece is the magnificent Arab Hall. The Hall is featured in issue ten of Cornucopia. A blue plaque commemorates Leighton at Leighton House Museum.

Leighton was an enthusiastic volunteer soldier, enrolling with the first group to join the 38th Middlesex (Artists') Rifle Volunteer Corps (later to be known as the Artists Rifles) on 5 October 1860. His qualities of leadership were immediately identified, and he was promoted to command a Company within a few months. On 6 January 1869 Captain Leighton was elected to command the Artists Rifles by a general meeting of the corps. In the same year he was promoted to major and in 1875 to lieutenant colonel. Leighton resigned as commanding officer in 1883. The painter James Whistler famously described the then Sir Frederic Leighton, the commanding officer of the Artists Rifles, as the: "Colonel of the Royal Academy and the President of the Artists Rifles – aye, and he paints a little!" At his funeral, on 3 February 1896, his coffin was carried into St Paul's Cathedral, past a guard of honour formed by the Artists Rifles.
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Robert Oscar Lenkiewicz (31 December 1941 – 5 August 2002) was one of South West England's most celebrated artists of modern times. Perennially unfashionable in high art circles, his work was nevertheless popular with the public. Lenkiewicz is regarded by some as a great painter who is 'finally being recognised as such after all these years of neglect by the art establishment, particularly by London, who would never have him. He didn't play the game as far as London commercial galleries were concerned. He did his own thing out in the provinces, which was looked down upon.'

He produced as many as 10,000 works (though this figure includes his prolific output as a pencil portrait artist), often on a large scale, and in themed 'projects' investigating hidden communities (Vagrancy 1973, Mental Handicap 1976) or difficult social issues (Suicide 1980, Death 1982).

In 1981, he faked his death, announcing his demise to the local newspapers. When Lenkiewicz died in 2002, he left behind a particularly macabre legacy as the embalmed body of one of his friends, a tramp named Diogenes, was found in the cupboard section at the bottom of a bookcase.

Robert Lenkiewicz was born in London in 1941, the son of refugees who ran a Jewish hotel in Fordwych Road. Robert Lenkiewicz spent his boyhood in the Hotel Shemtov in Cricklewood, which was run by his parents. His mother was a German baroness and his father a Polish horse breeder who both fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and arrived in London as penniless refugees. Lenkiewicz frequently stated in interview that the hotel's elderly residents included Holocaust survivors but this is contradicted by the artist's brother John, who recollects that the residents tended to be the parents or grandparents of 2nd or 3rd generation English Jews (for instance, the mother of popular entertainer Dickie Valentine), though the hotel's Czechoslovakian cook, Mrs Bobek, was a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Nevertheless, the loneliness and suffering the young painter witnessed at the hotel was "salutary and thought-provoking" according to Lenkiewicz. Lenkiewicz was inspired to paint after seeing Charles Laughton in Alexander Korda's biographical film Rembrandt. He attended Sir Christopher Wren junior technical school of art architecture and building from 1955 to 1958 graduating in art with distinction At 16, Lenkiewicz was accepted at Saint Martin's School of Art and later attended the Royal Academy. However, he was virtually impervious to contemporary art fashions, being more interested in his favourite paintings in the National Gallery.

Inspired by the example of Albert Schweitzer, Lenkiewicz threw open the doors of his studios to anyone in need of a roof – down and outs, addicts, criminals and the mentally ill congregated there. These individuals were the subjects of his paintings as a young man. However, such colourful characters were not welcomed by his neighbours and he was obliged to leave London in 1964.

He spent a year living in a remote cottage near Lanreath in Cornwall, supporting his young family by teaching, before being offered studio space on the Barbican in Plymouth by local artist and businessman John Nash. The artist's home and studios once more became a magnet for vagrants and street alcoholics, who then sat for paintings. Their numbers swelled and Lenkiewicz was forced to commandeer derelict warehouses in the city to house the 'dossers'. One of these warehouses also served as a studio and in 1973 became the exhibition space for the Vagrancy Project.

He first came to public attention when the media highlighted his giant mural on Plymouth's Barbican in the 1970s. Another furore occurred in 1981 when he faked his own death in preparation for the forthcoming project on the theme of Death (1982): "I could not know what it was like to be dead," said the artist, "but I could discover what it was like to be thought dead."

After his first exhibition with an established art dealer in the 1990s, Lenkiewicz's work enjoyed growing commercial success and some recognition by the establishment. He received a major retrospective in 1997 at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, attended by 42,000 visitors. In his obituary of Lenkiewicz, art critic David Lee observed: "Robert's greatest gift was to show us that an artist could be genuinely concerned about social and domestic issues and attempt the difficult task of expressing this conscience through the deeply unfashionable medium of figurative painting. In that sense, he was one of few serious painters of contemporary history." Lenkiewicz, aged 60, died of a heart attack in 2002. Despite his prolific output, he had only £12 cash in his possession (allegedly having never opened a bank account), and owed £2 million to various creditors. Since his death, examples of his best paintings have fetched six figure sums in London auction rooms.

The rise in Lenkiewicz's popularity was shown in the estate auctions of his personal collection of his own works. At Sotheby's in 2003, Bearnes 2004 and 2008, his paintings and private library raised £2.1 million.

A number of myths have arisen surrounding the artist's unusual barter economics, such as that Lenkiewicz never paid tax or kept any records of sales of his works; indeed, it is sometimes claimed that he never sold his work at all despite all his exhibition lists now in the public domain bearing prices. It is the case, however, that Lenkiewicz operated a system of patronage whereby a long-term collector or interested buyer would be handed a bill or two to be settled on behalf of the painter. This system operated until the mid-1990s, when the artist began to regularize his financial affairs in negotiation with the HMRC. Subsequent to the painter's death in 2002, media reports put the value of the artist's estate as £6.5 million. This figure included a cursory valuation of the artist's antiquarian library of rare books on witchcraft, the occult, metaphysics and medieval philosophy. However, the sale of this entire collection by Sotheby's in 2003 raised less than £1 million.

Lenkiewicz was the father of 12 children, some of whom have become artists in their own right. One of Robert's sons, Reuben Lenkiewicz, runs a gallery in Ashburton dedicated to his father's work - . The artist provided free lessons in techniques for figurative painting to anyone with aptitude and dedication. Lenkiewicz's pupils include Piran Bishop, Yana Travail, Dan Wheatley, Louise Courtnell, Lisa Stokes, Nahem Shoa and Joe Stoneman.

His step-daughter, with Celia Mills, is playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

The Vagrancy Project consisted of several dozen paintings and drawings of vagrants and a large book of notes written by the dossers themselves and those involved in their 'care' and control. Lenkiewicz hoped that the exhibition, and the down and outs' own stories, would illuminate the plight of these 'invisible people' and galvanise the community into humane action on their behalf. The format of the 'Project' – combining thematically linked paintings with the publication of research notes and the collected observations of the sitters – was to be used consistently throughout Lenkiewicz's career. Projects such as Mental Handicap (1976), Old Age (1979) and Death (1982) followed the one on vagrancy as Lenkiewicz continued to examine the lives of ostracised, hidden sections of the community and bring them to the attention of the general public.

The Paul Downes song "Robert and the Cowboys" was inspired by the project and describes a number of the vagrants.

In a parallel line of inquiry, Lenkiewicz also investigated some of society's most persistent taboos in projects such as Jealousy (1977), Orgasm (1978), Suicide (1980) and Sexual Behaviour (1983). Here, Lenkiewicz often adopted an allegorical pictorial style to portray human physiology in extremis. Lenkiewicz came to the conclusion that the kinds of sensations people felt when a lover abandoned them or when their cherished beliefs were threatened were identical in kind to the 'withdrawal symptoms' and anxieties experienced by addicts or alcoholics over their preferred narcotic. These projects thus became an extended study in 'addictive behaviour' (the title of his 20th, unfinished, project).

The conclusions drawn from his own observations were supported by his private library, which he viewed as a history of 'fanatical belief systems'. Lenkiewicz contended that in the absence of any good reasons for our beliefs or emotions we must always look to human physiology for an explanation of fanatical or obsessive behaviour and that it is there that we shall discover the roots of fascism – the tendency to treat another person as property.

On and off, for nearly 30 years, he worked on his masterpiece, the Riddle Mural in the Round Room at Port Eliot house, home of the Earl of St. Germans, but died before its completion. Half of the mural, in the 40-foot-diameter (12 m) room, shows death, destruction, insanity, unrequited love, and the apocalyptic end of the world. The other half reflects love and affection, friendships, harmony, proportion and consensus. Hidden in the work are various references to family skeletons, art history and cabalistic mysteries, hence the name – the Riddle Mural.

Over forty years Lenkiewicz built up a library of some 25,000 volumes devoted to art, the occult sciences, demonolatry, magic, philosophy, especially metaphysics, alchemy, death, psychology and sexuality, preoccupations which surface in some of his paintings. His collection of books on magic and witchcraft was one of the finest in private hands and was largely sold at Sotheby's in 2003, and a substantial part of the remainder of his library was sold at auction in May 2007 by Lyon & Turnbull.
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