The artist who taught the world to see the neon-blue ripples of a California swimming pool and the shifting light of the Yorkshire woods with fresh eyes has died. David Hockney, a titan of British Pop art and one of the most influential painters of the 20th and 21st centuries, was 88. He died on June 11, 2026, and Reuters reported that he died peacefully at home, with no cause of death given in the initial announcement.

He had been looking for light almost from the beginning. Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937, the fourth son of Kenneth and Laura Hockney, he grew up in a gray postwar city shaped by a pacifist father who worked as an accountant’s clerk and a mother who was vegetarian and Methodist. Yet even there, he was already gathering the images that would stay with him. He later recalled his father painting old bicycles after the war, a memory that seemed to lodge in his eye, and he said that at 11 he decided he wanted to be an artist.

Scholarship took him to Bradford Grammar School in 1948, where he preferred art class to all others. In 1953 he entered Bradford School of Art, and by 1957 he had graduated with a First Class Diploma with Honours for the National Diploma in Design examination before performing National Service. The path was already clear, and he moved to London in 1959 to study at the Royal College of Art, where he formed friendships with R. B. Kitaj and other students. By then, as AP News noted, he was making an impact even before graduating.

The early 1960s brought the first decisive turn in his art. In 1960 he saw the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, came under the influence of Walt Whitman, made his first love paintings, and showed work with Young Contemporaries. A year later he turned to etching, visited New York for the first time, and painted A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962 and received his first gallery representation from John Kasmin, and in 1963 he painted double portraits, completed the etchings for A Rake’s Progress, returned to New York, and mounted his first solo exhibition, Pictures with People In, at Kasmin’s gallery.

Then came the move that gave his work its brightest register. In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, where palm trees, swimming pools, and other California scenes became central to his art. The city gave him the conditions he had been searching for, and he put it plainly: “Strong shadows meant a lot of sun.” “So I thought, well, wherever that is, it’s always sunny.” California did not simply provide subject matter. It sharpened his sense of space, reflection, and pleasure, and it helped crystallize the voice that made him unmistakable.

The late 1960s brought the images that fixed him in the public imagination. In 1967 he painted A Bigger Splash, one of the most recognized works of his career and a defining image of his California period, and he won the John Moores Painting Prize that same year for Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. Those works captured his gift for making stillness feel alive, for turning a pool, a figure, or a burst of water into something both exact and elusive. He was already closely associated with portraiture too, especially double portraits, and that interest would remain one of the steady lines running through his career.

What made Hockney unusually durable was not only the clarity of his vision but the restlessness of his method. He worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and digital media, and he never seemed to treat one medium as enough. “The fascination of the brush dipping in the paint, putting it on, I love that,” he said, “even now, I could spend the whole day painting a door just one flat color.” That pleasure in making was matched by discipline. “I tend to think that you should work every day,” he said. “And I do.”

He also kept questioning how pictures worked at all. “The photograph has dominated the 20th century,” he said, but he believed the world was “infinitely more interesting” than a single photograph could capture. That conviction ran through his portraits, his landscapes, and his later experiments, including his embrace of the iPad. He was never content to repeat himself, even when the public had already settled on a version of him. He kept moving, and the work kept changing with him.

Recognition followed, though it never seemed to slow him down. He was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1997, and in 2012 he was included in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List as his exhibition David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opened at the Royal Academy of Arts. By then he had also established the David Hockney Foundation in 2008 to advance appreciation and understanding of visual art and culture through the exhibition, preservation, and publication of his work. The administrative frame mattered less than the work itself, but it reflected the seriousness with which he guarded and extended his own legacy.

He lived in Los Angeles in the 1960s and later spent significant periods in California, Yorkshire, and Normandy while continuing to work prolifically. That geographic restlessness suited an artist who was always testing how light changed a place and how a place changed a picture. He had begun in Bradford’s grayness and ended by making color feel like a way of thinking. Hockney’s legacy rests in that transformation, in the way he taught viewers to notice shadows, water, trees, and faces as if they were being seen for the first time. He left behind not just a body of work, but a way of looking that made the ordinary feel newly, and endlessly, alive.