Patrick Caulfield & Howard Hodgkin

From their first encounter in the early 1960s, the two British painters Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) and Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) formed a close friendship that would endure for decades. Like the bond between Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, their mutual respect was anchored in a shared sensibility, world outlook and unwavering dedication to their work. Hodgkin acknowledged that it was ‘the closest I ever came to having a painter-colleague’. In Caulfield he found an artist who similarly recognised how ‘the past and present join together’, and although stylistically the two could not have been more different, they shared an interest in capturing in paint the seemingly unremarkable aspects of modern life, its daily events, the people and places.