David Hockney: 'Rediscovered' sketch by famous Yorkshire artist could sell for up to £300,000

It’s not the most striking work by David Hockney ever seen but its simplicity is perhaps one of its attractions.

The work of a scene from an American hotel is also timely: it was created in 1970, 54 years ago, and has just been “rediscovered”.

Now when it goes on sale at a London auction house today (Jun 25), this sketch may fetch £300,000.

It is hailed as a “large prime period ‘California’ drawing” by the artist who hails from Bradford.

It has been rediscovered by Chiswick Auctions who say the crayon and pencil drawing ‘View from Miramar Hotel, Santa Monica’, measures 17in by 14in and is signed and dated DH 1970.

Hockney had first swapped Bradford for Los Angeles in 1964 and lived there intermittently ever since. Though currently residing mostly in Normandy, he still has his house and studio in the Hollywood Hills.

His first series of Californian swimming pool paintings were made from 1964-67.

Research has shown that the drawing was sold through the Kasmin Gallery, the London dealership run by John Kasmin who had first met Hockney in 1960 and begun selling his art from as early as 1963.

It was later loaned to the British Art’s Council for the seminal Hockney exhibition at the Louvre in 1974.

The exhibition featured key works such as ‘A Bigger Splash’ and ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’.

The UK based vendor contacted Chiswick’s Auctions for a general valuation request.

The drawing was inherited from the current vendor’s father, who possibly purchased the work from the Knoedler Gallery, but in the past 15 years its importance had been completely forgotten.

Its provenance now reassembled, it leads the forthcoming Modern British and Irish Art on June 25 with a guide of £200,000 £300,000.

That’s a cinch compared to some of his more sophisticated work which fetches seven figure sums.

A spokesman for the auction house said: “Hotels, and in particular luxury hotels, became an intermittent but recurring feature of David Hockney’s drawings from the time that he began to enjoy financial success after his first solo exhibition at the Kasmin gallery in 1963.

“Though it was irksome to him that this might give the impression that he was on perpetual holiday, the drawings that he made on his travels – as he himself pointed out – provided vivid evidence of the contrary: that wherever he was, he was always working, even when his travelling companions were napping, reading or lazing by the side of a swimming pool.

“The joy of drawing from observation had been instilled in him when he was a student in his native Bradford. As his world expanded, first to London, then to Europe and further afield, he responded with great enthusiasm to the stimulation of these new vistas.

“As he remarked with pithy accuracy in his brief artist statement to a group exhibition, Image in Progress, at the Grabowski Gallery in London in 1962: ‘I paint what I like, when I like, and where I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys.’ This assertive embrace of the outside world as something to be processed visually through his own eyes, hands and heart, so that every place is transformed into an episode within Hockney’s world, never left him.”