Peter Showering In Paris

This print, issued in an edition of 80 in 1976, is part of much-loved British artist David Hockney’s Photographs collection. It marks a return to one of Hockney’s most-depicted subjects: the male nude. As conveyed by the artist’s Erotic Prints series, Hockney’s 1964 move from cold and grey post-war London to California sparked a profound change in his work’s treatment of homosexuality; no longer reliant on coded, cryptic messages as a means to explore the theme of gay love, as in the euphemistic painting We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), Hockney began to depict the nude bodies of male partners and friends as an artistic subject. This print is an intimate photographic portrayal of Hockney’s onetime lover and portrait artist, Peter Schlesinger. Hockney and Schlesinger met in 1966 when Hockney was teaching a summer drawing class at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Schlesinger, then a student, quickly became a model for Hockney and later a romantic partner. Schlesinger moved into Hockney’s Los Angeles home and later accompanied him to London, where he enrolled at the world-famous Slade School of Fine Art. Schlesinger has appeared in some of Hockney’s most famous paintings, including Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (traces of which can be seen in the photographic print, Herrenhauser Park, Hannover) and the resolutely iconic Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) – a piece partly inspired by the photograph John St Clair Swimming (1972).