Christie’s will offer David Hockney’s double portrait *Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy* (1968) as a marquee lot in its 20th-century evening sale in New York this November. The painting depicts the English writer Christopher Isherwood and his American artist partner Don Bachardy in their Santa Monica home, and is the first of Hockney’s seven double portraits. No estimate has been announced. The work was previously featured in the “David Hockney 25” survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and in a 2017–18 Hockney retrospective that traveled from Tate Britain to the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This sale matters because Hockney’s double portraits have achieved some of the highest prices for living artists—*Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)* sold for $90.3 million in 2018 and *Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott* for $49.5 million in 2019. The painting also carries cultural significance for its frank depiction of a gay relationship in conservative mid-century America, a theme that art writers have called “homosensuality.” The auction will test whether this historically and artistically important work can match the market performance of Hockney’s other iconic portraits.