This important work brilliantly captures a brief moment in time within an extraordinary period in the lives of the sitters and the artist. It also marks a significant moment in Procktor’s output as it is probably one of the first examples of his work in watercolour and demonstrates his immediate fluency in the medium.

It was painted by Procktor in Lucca, Italy in 1967. It is a rare portrait of David Hockney, and shows him painting, in his stooped fashion, the celebrated American art critic and curator Mario Amaya. It was made during a trip around Europe that Procktor, Hockney and his boyfriend and muse Peter Schlesinger took in 1967, in the middle of what would be a key period in the lives of all four men.

In the spring of 1967 Hockney having just finished painting his Californian masterpiece ‘Bigger Splash’ returned to England with Schelsinger. At the end of July, the two young lovers set off on a trip around Europe with Procktor for company, who was fresh from the success of his third exhibition with the Redfern Gallery. They traveled in Hockney’s brand new Morris Minor and after winding their way through France via Paris and Douglas Cooper's villa in Nimes they eventually set course for Lucca to stay with Amaya.

As they traveled they painted, and Hockney and Procktor decided to try their hands at painting in watercolour. Whilst Procktor discovered a true love of the immediacy of the medium and would go onto to become a great master of it, Hockney could not persevere with it. In his biography Hockney said that this trip…

‘was the first time I properly tried watercolour, but in the end I preferred coloured pencils... With watercolour you have to follow certain rules or you are in the soup. For instance you have to move from light to dark because you can't put a light colour on top of a dark, and generally you can’t put more than three coats on otherwise the colour would start to get non-descript and muddy. There are techniques you have to follow and I got into it a bit, but I didn't get into it enough for me to want to carry on.'

The three artists would eventually leave Lucca and go on to France to spend time with Hockney’s gallerist John Kasmin.

After the trip great change affected all of their lives. Not long after they returned, a major step forward was made in the decriminalisation of homosexual acts with the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Later that year Hockney painted ‘The Room, Manchester Street’ a portrait of Procktor, marking the beginning of a ten-year period spent on his superb series of large portraits featuring friends or relations and including his much celebrated ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’. After the trip Schlesinger remained in UK to pursue a career as an artist at the Slade, his entrance no doubt assisted by his friendship with alumnus Procktor. Most extraordinarily, a year later Amaya found himself on the front of every major world newspaper after being shot by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas whilst in Andy Warhol's studio in New York. Amaya was fortunate only to be grazed by two bullets, Warhol, however, was not so lucky and very nearly died, suffering from the effects of his injuries for the rest of his life.


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