<b>David Hockney</b>
(1962)

<i>After a trip to Florence, Rome, and Berlin with his friend Jeff Goodman, Hockney begins teaching at Maidstone School of Art in the autumn. 

“I taught for one year at Maidstone,” Hockney remembers, “then I gave it up because I would rather have been working on my own work. I didn’t mind teaching once I was there, but in the end I began to resent it.”

He sets himself up with a studio in his new home at Powis Terrace in  London’s Notting Hill district, where among the first works he completes is this one:</I>

https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/1962

The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I)
1962
Oil on canvas
182 x 214 cm
Tate, London

https://www.tate-images.com/t00596-The-First-Marriage-A-Marriage-of-Styles-I.html
https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/artwork/3587

The First Marriage is a large painting depicting a couple seen in profile. The man stands behind the woman who is seated, although there is no support beneath her. As in several of Hockney’s painting made in the early 1960s, much of the canvas has been left in its natural state so that most of the background is empty. To the left of the couple, a grey pointed gothic arch shape is painted over an abstract area of colours. Hockney has said that he added this ‘for its ecclesiastical connections with marriage’ (quoted in David Hockney: Seven Paintings, [p.3]