There is no diver — only the trace of the dive; we have arrived a fraction of a second too late.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- Hockney painstakingly painted the instant splash over about two weeks with small brushes.
- There is no diver — only the trace of the dive; we have arrived a fraction of a second too late.
- It is the third 'splash' painting, after 'The Splash' and 'A Little Splash'.
- Hockney was inspired by Californian light, pools and modernist architecture.
- In 2018 another of his pool paintings sold for $90m — then a record for a living artist.
Estimated value
What it is worth today
A Bigger Splash belongs to London's Tate and is not for sale. For comparison, another Hockney pool painting sold for $90.3 million in 2018 — then a record for a living artist.
More details Hockney spent two weeks painting a two-second splash, hiding an entire California era inside one flat, sunlit frame.
What's on the canvas
A pool cut clean in half
The canvas is almost square — 242.5 by 243.9 cm — and the pool's tiled edge splits it into two neat halves. The top half holds a flat, cloudless sky and a low, blush-pink modernist house with a wall of sliding glass: the glass reflects neighbouring rooftops and the stiff silhouettes of tropical plants, as if the house were watching itself. An empty deck chair sits on a strip of impossibly tidy lawn, and two spindly palm trunks cut straight up through the composition, echoing the window frames.
The bottom half is turquoise water, a white tiled rim, and a yellow diving board jammed into the frame at a diagonal — the one curved, off-kilter line among all those right angles. Above the water hangs the fan-shaped splash, breaking into individual drops and flecks of foam, while everything else is filled with flat, almost printed colour. Around the edge Hockney left a narrow strip of bare canvas, a border like the white rim of a Polaroid, which makes the whole thing read less like a painting than an enlarged snapshot pulled out of a hot California noon. Nothing else happens on the canvas — no people, no cars, no birds, just reflections and the trace of something that occurred a second earlier. There's no shadow anywhere in the picture, not under the house, not under the diving board, and that missing shadow is what makes the whole afternoon feel frozen, as if not just the splash but the California sun itself had stopped moving.
How it was made
Two weeks for two seconds
Hockney painted A Bigger Splash in California between April and June 1967, while teaching painting at Berkeley; a canvas this size was simply nailed straight to the wall, no stretcher, no easel. The house, pool and sky went down in broad flat planes: he masked off sections with paper tape and rolled the acrylic on in two or three coats, chasing a perfectly smooth, impersonal surface with no visible brushmark anywhere — there was no preliminary drawing either, just blocks of colour laid straight onto the canvas. The palette stayed narrow: cobalt and ultramarine for water and sky, a few ochres and siennas for the walls, a touch of Hooker's green for the foliage. He only pulled the tape once the acrylic had fully dried; peeled off too soon, it left a ragged edge instead of the clean, straight line that makes the house and sky look almost printed rather than painted.
The splash is the one place the brush touched canvas directly, no roller, no tape, and it moved at a completely different speed — small brushes, worked from a photograph in a book about building swimming pools that Hockney happened to come across. He hadn't photographed his own dive, and barely photographed anything back then; he only bought his first 35mm camera that same year, 1967. The house in the background isn't invented either — it's assembled from sketches of Californian architecture he'd made on his travels. That spring his frequent model for other canvases was Peter Schlesinger, his partner at the time, but no one posed for A Bigger Splash at all — this is a painting made from a photograph of a photograph. It closed out a trilogy: A Little Splash and The Splash had appeared a year earlier, the canvas growing bigger and the background more elaborate each time.
Where the imagery comes from
Cool over gesture
Hockney (/en/artists/david-hockney/) finished at London's Royal College of Art in 1962, but he found his real subject somewhere else: after a first visit to California in 1963 he moved there for good a year later. Pools and glass-walled houses weren't just new scenery — they were a deliberate rejection of what his generation was doing in American painting, the sprawling emotional gesture of Abstract Expressionism. He went the other way: a smooth, almost advertising-glossy surface that puts him near Pop Art, a label he never much liked. Even earlier, in the early 1960s, he'd painted showers and bathers, and The Splash and A Little Splash carried that straight forward — already in those, as in the London picture, there was no body, only a trace. At his own degree show at the Royal College in 1962, Hockney turned up in a gold jacket with bleached hair, defying the dress code — the same cool, unbothered provocation that, five years on, would harden into the icy calm of A Bigger Splash.
In that sense Hockney's method is the exact opposite of what Van Gogh does in The Starry Night: there, the agitated brushwork trembles across every inch of canvas, while here the brush truly switches on only once, in the splash, and everything else is deliberately flattened down to photograph-level calm. What's missing is just as telling: where Klimt's two figures are wound into a gold cocoon in The Kiss, Hockney gives us an empty deck chair and spray where somebody's body had vanished under the water a moment before, a body the painter never shows. A borrowed gesture is replaced here by a borrowed photograph — Hockney works not from life or feeling but from a ready-made picture found in a book, a thoroughly twentieth-century move, in which the camera is as legitimate a source as a sleepless night at the window once was for Van Gogh.
What happened to it
From a London drawing room to the Tate
In 1968 the painting was bought, through John Kasmin's gallery, by Sheridan, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava — himself a co-owner of the Kasmin gallery and one of Hockney's earliest patrons; it was at Kasmin's that Hockney had his first solo show back in 1963. A Bigger Splash hung in Dufferin's London house for more than a decade before the Tate bought it in 1981, through the Knoedler gallery, with Grant-in-Aid funding, and gave it the catalogue number T03254.
It has hung at Tate Britain on Millbank ever since, and remains one of the gallery's most requested loans: in 2017 it featured in the big retrospective marking Hockney's 80th birthday, which opened at Tate Britain before travelling to the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum: the show ran from 9 February to 29 May, and demand was high enough that the museum stayed open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. That show drew 478,082 visitors — the highest attendance in the history of the Millbank gallery, around 4,300 people a day, with almost 35,000 tickets sold in advance, more than for any previous Tate exhibition. For a canvas well past its fiftieth birthday, that's a remarkably quiet biography — no thefts, no lawsuits, no restoration scandals of the kind that dog paintings of this stature; the loudest drama around Hockney's splashes involved not this canvas but the price of another of his pool paintings, which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million. The canvas itself has needed no major conservation work since 1981: Liquitex acrylic, unlike oil paint, barely yellows or cracks with age, so the gallery shows it in roughly the state the Tate bought it in.
Cultural afterlife
A title that outlived its splash
The title has long had a life of its own. In 1973 director Jack Hazan made A Bigger Splash, part documentary and part staged drama, about Hockney and Peter Schlesinger, the partner he was breaking up with at exactly that time. In 2015 Luca Guadagnino borrowed the same title for his film with Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson, a loose remake of the French film La Piscine (1969); the plot has nothing to do with Hockney's canvas, but the title instantly ties the film to the same idea of a California pool as a place of hidden desire and looming disaster.
In 2013 the artist Ramiro Gomez made his own version, called No Splash: same pool, same house, but instead of a splash there's a pool cleaner netting debris out of the water and a maid sweeping by the glass wall; the piece belonged to his Domestic Scenes series, shown at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Gomez has spent years putting the gardeners, nannies and cleaners back into Hockney's paintings, the people the comfortable California landscape usually erases — and he does it exactly where Hockney already leaves the viewer wondering where the person went, the one who left only a splash behind. The Tate has sold posters of the painting for decades, it remains one of the most reproduced images in twentieth-century British art, and the market keeps confirming that reputation: the $90.3 million paid for another Hockney pool painting in 2018 showed that his California pools are still the most expensive landscapes without a single person in them ever sold from a living artist.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution page Tate, London
Visual context
