"I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.", Sir Howard Hodgkin, 1976
Sir Howard Hodgkin, CH CBE (Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin, August 6, 1932 – March 9, 2017) was a British painter and printmaker, widely regarded as one of the most distinctive colorists in late twentieth-century European painting. Born in Hammersmith, London, the son of an ICI manager and a botanical illustrator, he was evacuated to the United States during the Second World War and trained at the Camberwell School of Art and the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham before establishing himself in the British art scene of the 1960s. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984, won the Turner Prize in 1985, was appointed CBE in 1977, knighted in 1992, and made a Companion of Honour in 2003.
His mature paintings, small to mid-sized panels and frames worked across years and across multiple campaigns of paint, with bold gestural marks of saturated colour that often run from the painted surface onto the integrated wooden frame, are unlike anything else then being made in British painting. His parallel career as a printmaker produced an extensive body of editioned work, much of it published in collaboration with the Alan Cristea Gallery in London. He was also a major collector of Indian court painting, assembling over sixty years one of the finest such collections in private hands; the Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022 and exhibited as Indian Skies. His own paintings are held in the Tate, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and essentially every other major collection of postwar European art.