David Hockney|Dogs and Sunflowers (Lococo Mulder, 1995)

The series brings Hockney's dachshunds into colour etching and sets them beside the flowers that were entering his studio work. From 1993 Stanley and Boodgie became the subject of drawings, etchings and more than 40 paintings made over the next few years. Everything was drawn from observation. "They don't stay long in one position and one knock on the door is enough to make them leap up," Hockney said, so he left large sheets of paper all over the house and studio to catch them at rest. By 1995 the dogs had their own exhibitions: 'Some Large New Paintings and Twenty-Five Dogs Upstairs' at L.A. Louver in Venice, California, that spring, and 'David Hockney Dog Paintings' at the 1853 Gallery in Saltaire over the summer.

Aquatint and line

Aquatint prints areas of grainy tone from the plate, and in this series it carries the colour. 'Stanley And Boodgie, Horizontal Dogs' and 'Vertical Dogs' use three colours of aquatint. 'Small Dogs' adds a one-colour hard-ground etching to two colours of aquatint, and each sunflower pairs a hard-ground etching with a single colour of aquatint.

Before and after

The sunflowers belong to a turn towards flowers in Hockney's studio. Flower paintings were part of his work in 1995, and in 1996 he painted a run of sunflower still lifes, among them '30 Sunflowers'. In 1998 he and his old friend the printer Maurice Payne set up a print studio in his Hollywood Hills house, where Payne left prepared plates for him to draw on whenever he liked. The 'Dog Etching' prints are among the works of that year.