In 1987 The Queen revived the tradition of commissioning portraits of members of the Order of Merit, with the intention that each member should be drawn by a different artist. By 2004, forty-four portraits have been added to the series, of which the portrait of Lord Rothschild by David Hockney is the most recent, having been presented by the artist in 2003.

Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild is one of the leading figures in the British cultural scene. He was Chairman of the National Gallery from 1985 to 1991 and then Chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund from 1992 to 1998, and has been President of the Institute of Jewish Affairs since 1992. Lord Rothschild was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2002.

In March 1999, following a visit to an exhibition of portraits by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) at the National Gallery, David Hockney began to make portrait drawings using the ‘camera lucida’, a device invented in the early nineteenth century and consisting of a small prism with two lenses, mounted above a sheet of paper to allow the artist to see both subject and paper superimposed. The artist may thus see his or her drawing hand apparently moving over the outlines of the subject and may quickly fix the proportions of a sitter’s features by recording the salient points, before elaborating the portrait in the more familiar manner, looking alternately between subject and paper (or ‘eyeballing’, in Hockney’s phrase).

Hockney is of the opinion that the use by artists of optical devices (lenses and concave mirrors) caused a revolution of realism during the fifteenth century, and was much more important for the development of painting than has hitherto been supposed; ‘not to suggest that all artists were using lenses, only that they were all trying, to various extents and with differing results, to emulate the naturalistic effects - the ‘look’, the ‘looking like’ - of lens-based images’. The ramifications of this theory have not met with universal acceptance.

Signed and dated at lower right DH 99

Text adapted from Holbein to Hockney: Drawings from the Royal Collection