Hockney Sleeping Dachshund Painting Heads to Auction
Six Paintings, One Foundation, and a Price With No Precedent
David Hockney painted him in 1995 — Stanley, his own dachshund, curled up on a cushion, eyes shut. For roughly three decades the canvas stayed in private hands, and it is now one of only six of the Dog Series paintings remaining in private hands. It is now to be sold at Christie’s, with an estimate of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds. No painting from Hockney’s Dog Series has ever come to auction before, which is why Christie’s can price it against a market with no comparable sale.
Christie’s believes only six of the dog paintings remain in private hands. The rest are owned by the David Hockney Foundation. “This is such an exciting painting for us,” said Tessa Lord, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. [1] “The rarity is kind of extraordinary.” The series itself is not small: Hockney painted more than 40 works for it in 1994 and 1995. That split matters for the price: the foundation holds the bulk of the series and does not sell, so the six privately held canvases are the only supply the market can ever bid for.
How this particular one came loose is documented. The seller bought Dog Painting 17 after the dog series went on display at the LA Louver gallery. Hockney said that show drew 7,000 people in four days. [1] Many of them, he added, brought their own dogs. The seller acquired the canvas at that show, which means the only public outing of the series is also the reason this one reached the open market.
Grief, Sunshine, and a Series That Stayed Private
The series began for reasons that had nothing to do with dogs. Hockney started the dog paintings when he needed some sunshine in his life. He had lost several friends to Aids. He was devastated by the death of one of his closest and oldest friends, Henry Geldzahler. The artist told a journalist he wanted “desperately to paint something loving”. [1]
Tessa Lord reads the result through that history: he felt such a loss of love, she said, that the series became a kind of catharsis for him.
Lord also describes what sits on the surface. The painting shows, in her words, “incredible spontaneity” and a “fluidity of brushstrokes,” while still feeling richly textured. She points to the mottling underneath the cushion and to the slight flick of the ear that animates Stanley.
She adds that the picture carries more than a likeness. “There’s a universality to it… it’s so much more than just a portrait of a dog,” she said, describing an innocence in it that does not exhaust it. The estimate is a range, not a valuation: Christie’s sets it to attract bidders, and the final hammer depends on how many collectors want the only Dog Painting that will ever be offered.
Two Dachshunds, One Hollywood Hills House
Christopher Simon Sykes, Hockney’s authorised biographer, writes that friends were astonished the painter was getting a dog at all. They soon saw how besotted he was. The noisy dachshunds became an essential part of his visitor-filled life in his Hollywood Hills home on Montcalm Avenue. House training was never a priority, and the friend Jonathon Brown recalled how the dogs used to defecate in his shoes.
Stanley was picked out as a puppy in 1987 and named after Stan Laurel; Boodgie arrived later and was the more reserved of the two. Both dogs appear in more than 40 paintings made in 1994 and 1995, the body of work the auction now draws on. Hockney died in June.
Sources
1. Guardian — Quote source (original article)