Mr and Mrs Clark & Percy
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Mr and Mrs Clark & Percy, David Hockney, Acrylic on Canvas, 1971 |
This painting depicts the
newly-married fashion designer Ossie Clark and his wife the
textile designer Celia Birtwell in their flat in Notting Hill,
London, with one of the couple's cats on Clark's knee. Actually, Percy was
their other cat but Hockney thought that Percy made a better title; read on to
find out why! It is a very large canvas so that the figures are nearly
life-sized. They are both looking directly outward making the viewer a third
person in the triangle. Typically, the cat disdains this and looks out of the
window. The room is stark in a 1960s minimalist style.
Among the various sources that
Hockney drew on was Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini
Marriage (see below). There is plenty of symbolism in both works.
The Arnolfini dog, which represents fidelity, is replaced by the cat, a symbol
of the penis, and representing lack of fidelity ('Percy' is a
slang term for a penis).
Hockney's portrait, with the bride standing and the
groom sitting, reverses the convention of traditional wedding portraiture, such
as Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas
Gainsborough (also shown below). Indeed Hockney shows the Clarks
standing apart, a foreshadowing of their 1974 divorce because of his bi-sexual
infidelity. And the reversal of roles hints that she is the
dominant party.
The lilies next to Celia Birtwell, a symbol of female
purity, are also associated with depictions of the Annunciation; at the time of
the portrait she was pregnant.
Hockney worked and reworked the portraits many
times until he was satisfied, repainting Clark's head perhaps twelve times. He
achieves the difficult task of balancing the dark figures against the light
flooding in through the window behind them.
