The man who painted sun-drenched Californian pools and the rolling Yorkshire Wolds has been lowered into the earth. David Hockney, the nation's most beloved living artist until his death last week at 87, was buried in a private ceremony yesterday attended only by his closest family and a handful of friends. The location was kept secret until after the service, a final act of privacy from a man who spent decades in the public eye but always guarded his inner world fiercely.
There were no state honours, no televised funeral. Just the quiet thud of earth on a wooden coffin. It seems fitting for an artist who, despite his fame, remained fundamentally a working painter, more interested in the quality of light at 4pm than the cut of his suit.
On the streets of Bridlington, where Hockney lived for much of his later life, a small crowd gathered outside his studio. 'He put us on the map,' said Margaret, a retired shopkeeper. 'But more than that, he showed us how beautiful it all is. The fields, the rain, the way the winter light hits the sea.'
The cultural shift is palpable. Hockney was the last of a generation that treated art as a direct conversation with the world, not a conceptual puzzle. He used iPads with the same glee he used charcoal. He was a populist in the best sense, believing art belonged to everyone, not just the critics.
His absence will be felt most acutely in the quiet spaces: the empty chair at the café where he sketched, the blank wall where a new work might have hung. We mourn not just the man, but the permission he gave us to see colour in the mundane. His greatest legacy is not a single painting, but the way we now look at a tree. For that, he will not be forgotten.