Name: The Poet
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of David Hockney's The Poet, a signed intaglio print from 1977, is estimated to be worth between £1,000 and £1,550. This work has shown consistent value growth and has an auction history of 14 total sales since its entry to the market in June 2006. Over the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £862 in December 2023 to £3,200 in December 2021. The average annual growth rate of this piece is 5% and the edition size is limited to 200.

Meaning & Analysis

Featuring a portrait of Wallace Stevens, the poet who wrote the poem ‘The Blue Guitar’ which inspired Hockney to create the series of etchings this work belongs to, The Poet is a charming composition which incorporates many of the artist’s different styles and subjects. The portrait itself is a classic Hockney, similar to his line drawings, picking out the features of the poet with minimal fuss and recalling many of the his portraits of his closest friends and companions. To the left of the poet there is an arrangement of marks which recalls the etched piles of straw and gold in Hockney’s Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm series. Above that we see a series of geometric shapes or stones which show his preference for tonal cross hatching, juxtaposed with brightly coloured shadows in red, blue, green and yellow. On the layer above, these stones are transformed into blobs of these colours, their shadows now a traditional grey. Crowning the composition is the blue guitar of the series title. Altogether these disparate elements make for an enigmatic and yet charming composition, which shows Hockney at his playful best, experimenting with the sugarlift aquatint technique he had only recently learned and pushing the boundaries of printmaking once more.