David Hockney was a British painter, born in Bradford in 1937, who spent his life repainting the way we look at things. He became famous in the 1960s for his California swimming pools, above all A Bigger Splash, then kept reinventing himself for six decades, from photo collages to drawings made on an iPad. He died at home on 11 June 2026, at the age of 88.
Almost no one has seen a splash like the one on that canvas. It lasts a fraction of a second, and Hockney spent about two weeks painting it.
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A Bigger Splash is almost a perfect square, about two and a half meters on each side, and most of it is flat. Hockney laid down the sky, the house and the water with a paint roller, in two or three coats, and left strips of bare canvas around the edges, which gives the picture the look of a Polaroid. The only place he used small brushes was the splash.
He built the picture from borrowed pieces. The pool came from a photograph in a book, the house from one of his own drawings of Californian buildings, and the splash from a photograph of a splash that Hockney says he did not take. In 2009 the Tate asked him who had jumped into the pool. He answered: "I don't know actually."
So the swimmer behind the most famous splash in modern painting has no name and no face, and the painter himself cannot supply either. Hockney has said he enjoyed taking two weeks to paint a moment that lasted two seconds. Everything he made afterwards, from double portraits to Polaroid grids, plays with the same gap between a moment and the time it takes to look at it.
What You'll Discover
What he painted when he left London.
What the cat in the portrait is called.
Why he abandoned a pool painting.
Why he glued photographs into grids.
Which old masters he said used lenses.
What he drew during lockdown.