David Hockney began making line drawings in the later 1960s and continued to do so for most of the 1970s. His idiom of line drawing is elementary, being entirely free of modelling in the form of hatching or cross-hatching. A richness of detail is achieved using line alone. The prowess and fluidity of Hockney’s draughtsmanship have underpinned his experiments in representation throughout his career, facilitating his characteristic contrasts of verisimilitude and abstraction. His line drawings are freely composed, with many loose and seemingly independent strands of pen and ink quickly achieving a representational quality in relation to one another.

Though Hockney occasionally made line drawings of still life subjects such as fruit and vases of flowers, his dominant subject in this idiom was portraiture. These drawings usually depict the artist’s friends and were made from informal sittings, the two friends sitting across from one another in comfortable chairs and in familiar surroundings. Recurring sitters at the time included Henry Geldzahler, his dealer John Kasmin, and his partner Gregory Evans. Items of clothing often provided as much visual interest as the face and hands. There is rarely much enunciation of surroundings – occasionally the chair or bed that the sitter is reclining on, a few lines of skirting or mouldings, and so on. These artworks belonged to the artist’s private domestic space and exist separately from Hockney’s more public activities in acrylic paint and printmaking. Rather than being exhibited for sale, many of these drawings were given as gifts to the sitter.

This drawing depicts Bernard Nevill, a distinguished teacher of textiles and fashion and himself a successful textile designer for Liberty. After teaching textiles and fashion variously at St Martin’s, the Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art (RCA), he became Professor of Textiles at the RCA. Ossie Clark was one of Nevill’s pupils at the RCA and it was through him that Nevill met David Hockney. Nevill made his home at West House in Chelsea, a remarkable Arts and Crafts property designed by Philip Webb (fig. 1), and Hockney paid a visit there in autumn 1967. It was perhaps then that Hockney made this drawing. Hockney and Nevill are also known to have visited Oxfordshire together in 1969, and Nevill visited Hockney at his Powis Terrace home in the 1970s.

Hockney made two further line drawings of Nevill, all of which were given to the sitter. Nevill had a reputation for his dandyish dress sense and each of Hockney’s drawings emphasises some aspect of his apparel. In this work, an air of mannered sophistication is suggested by the striped tie, extravagant pocket handkerchief, loosely pulled together double cuffs and double-breasted jacket. Speaking in 2006, Nevill emphasised the huge amount of time that was spent on creating his personal wardrobe at this time.

I would spend so much time having tweed specially woven and shirts specially made by Michael Fish, Deborah and Clare, Turnbull and Asser… choosing the shirtings and stripes. I would then spend hours or days going to Maxwell's my shoemaker and choosing the suede skins for my suede shoes. Going to Michael Fish and finding a piece of pale beige suede. I had a jacket made in that beige suede and of course, ties. The time involved was unbelievable. One suit made by Tommy Nutter, I slung a length of blue jeans [material] to him and said, “make me a hand-stitched Saville Row suit but in denim,” and he did, and then a panné velvet that I had specially woven for Liberty Prints and had it dyed eau-de-nil, and got him to do that.

All of these activities show that Bernard Nevill was a key participant in the so-called Peacock Revolution. Hockney’s line drawings of Nevill only emphasise his pre-eminent position in the ‘swinging’ moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They further suggest a culture in which fashion and art were thoroughly intermingled. Both sitter and artist, Nevill and Hockney, belonged to a rarefied new world, existing mainly in certain districts of London, which sought to shed established social norms and was driven onwards by a thirst for new and more outrageous stylistic inventions. Something of this world emerges from these playful, dressy artworks – a celebrity artist’s drawings of his fashionable friend.

This drawing has been shown to David Hockney Inc. and some of the information included here was supplied from the artist’s private records.