Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born on 6 August in Hammersmith, London. H’s first name came from his maternal grandfather, Gordon Hewart, a draper’s son from Bury, Lancashire, who became a journalist, lawyer, M.P. (1913-1922) and Lord Chief Justice (1922-1940). Lord Hewart said in 1924, ‘it is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’. H’s father’s side of the family connected him to a series of interlocking Quaker families, scientists such as Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866. the older brother of H's great-great-grandfather), who gave his name to Hodgkin’s disease and the pharmacist Luke Howard F.R.S. (1772-1864), who named the clouds in 1802 and after whom H took his second name. Cousins include Roger Fry (1866-1934) and his sister Margery (1874-1958) as well as the conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner (1943- ). Eliot is another family name. Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987) was another cousin, collector and artist (specialising in still lifes in tempera). H’s father, Eliot was a passionate gardener, who was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society’s gold medal, worked for ICI. When a gardening friend, E.B. Anderson, invented the ‘queen of the dwarf irises’, he named it ‘Katherine Hodgkin’ in honour of H’s mother. The Daily Telegraph said that it ‘Has to be seen to be believed.’ http://www.avonbulbs.co.uk/iris-katherine-hodgkin_1080_1082.htm

At the age of 5 H determines to become a painter.

Evacuated with mother and older sister, Ann (1930 – 2006), to USA, where they live on Long Island and he attends Greenvale School. His early ambition to paint is reinforced when he sees pictures by Stuart Davis, Matisse and Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

At Eton College the art teacher Wilfrid Blunt shows his pupils works borrowed from the Royal Library, next door in Windsor Castle, including Ustad Mansur’s Chameleon (circa 1612, RL12081,http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/eGallery/object.asp?imgbuttonsearch=&radioAll=0&startYear=&searchText=&title=Chameleon&rccode=&makerName=Mansur&category=&collector=&endYear=&pagesize=20&object=912081&row=0 ). H begins to collect Indian miniatures. But he runs away from school twice. He transfers to Bryanston School in Dorset where he appreciates the art teacher Charles Handley-Read but soon runs away again. H is sent to a psychiatrist but convinces him that all he needs is to return to the States. He spends the summer back on Long Island.

Studies at Camberwell School of Art (along with Gillian Ayres, Harry Mundy and Christopher Pinsent), where the dominant ethos is ‘Euston Road’ realism.

Completes the first work he believes in, Memoirs, an ‘astonishingly prophetic’ small painting, as Richard Cork called it (The Evening Standard, 1976). Its medium (gouache on board), title and subject (a conversation in an interior) anticipate later and apparently disparate work.

Studies at the residential Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, Wiltshire, which is run by charismatic artists Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. ‘We were taught the Old Master method of painting’, Hodgkin told Alan Woods in 1998. ’Starting with the middle-tone ground and going down into it and up from it. I painted a copy of a Raphael head…But nobody believed in it [the method].’ (Transcript, 03/02) Teachers included William Scott, Jack Smith and Peter Lanyon. With Colin Thompson H arranges the first show of Andre Derain’s paintings in England.

First shows in a public gallery - in Bath Art Society’s group show at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath – probably Portrait, which has since been lost.*See Missing  Works

Creates his first print, Acquainted with the Night, based on a poem by Robert Frost. *See Missing Works

Appointed assistant art master at Charterhouse School, Surrey on one year’s probation. He resigns as soon as the appointment is confirmed.

Marries Julia Lane (two sons, Louis, born 1958 and Sam, born 1960). They live in 114 Sinclair Road, Hammersmith, London until 29 September 1958.

Teaches part time at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, along with painters Michael Craig-Martin, Robyn Denny, John Ernest and Adrian Heath; the ceramicist James Tower; poet James Kirkup; puppet-makers Helen Binyon and Riette Sturge Moore; movement teacher Litz Pisk and the composer Henry Boys

A ‘tidal wave’ of contemporary American art reaches London, with Abstract Expressionism (1956) and New American Painting (1959) at the Tate and Bryan Robertson’s shows of Jackson Pollock (1958) and Mark Rothko (1961) at the Whitechapel Gallery. ‘It is strange to think that it is possible to paint a picture which is so much bigger than you are’, Hodgkin told Alan Woods in 1998. ‘And that’s one of the gifts of the New York school; they taught us that more is more.’

The Hodgkins move to 12 Addison Gardens, Kensington, where they stay until 24 December 1966.

The graphic artist and critic Roger Coleman arranges for Hodgkin to show 9 works, including Dancing, Bedroom, Afternoon and Mr and Mrs Robyn Denny, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in Two Young Figurative Artists (with Allen Jones). Coleman, his first wife Margaret and his second wife Brigid Seagrave become friends.

At the age of 30 Hodgkin has his first solo exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons, London. ‘His work has none of the drabness which is too frequently associated by modern artists with pretensions to intellect’, Edward Lucie-Smith writes in the catalogue. ‘…this is painting to be enjoyed – that is, providing your idea of enjoyment doesn’t rule out the occasional need to think.’ It is not a commercial success. ‘I think I’ve been fortunate in that I wasn’t at all successful until I was middle-aged’, Hodgkin told Lucie-Smith in 1981, ‘…but there were many bitter moments to live through when it was so long before anybody seemed to want to look at my pictures at all.’

First visits India, where he travels with Robert Skelton, then Assistant Keeper of the Indian Collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Hodgkin returns every year for many years. ‘I think my main reason for going back to India’, he told David Sylvester in 1984, ‘is because it is somewhere else.’ ‘Painting in a studio is naturally a lonely occupation’, he wrote in 1991, in the catalogue to his collection of Indian paintings and drawings. ‘Collecting, on the other hand, brings with it an almost automatic series of introductions, social contacts, with dealers, scholars and occasionally with fellow collectors.’ New friends include scholars (Simon Digby and Ellen Smart); dealers (Terence McInerney and John Hewitt); collectors (Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, who lived in Smith Square) and contemporary Indian artists such as Bhupen Khakhar and Vivan Sundaram.  

Shows 10 new paintings at Arthur Tooth & Son’s, London, including Gardening and The Japanese Screen (which was owned by his friend the writer Bruce Chatwin).

H’s work is included in London: the New Scene at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota. His friends include artists like Patrick Caulfield (who takes a studio in H’s house), R.B.Kitaj, Richard Smith, Stephen Buckley, Mick Moon and Robyn Denny. He paints many of their portraits, as though to emphasise his outsider status: he is never part of Pop Art, or the Situation movement or Kitaj’s ‘School of London’. His work resists classification. His ‘are not abstract pictures’, Alistair Smith points out later, ‘– the marks and shapes often refer to their figurative origin. In a picture of Anthony Hill and Gillian Wise, for example, the black and white rectangular image is a witty parody of one of Hill’s own reliefs as much as it is a formal dance within the picture.’ (From the introduction to the catalogue for The Artist’s Eye, 1979)

Moves to Long Dean, Wiltshire, where he lives until 1977.

Teaches part time at Chelsea School of Art, London, along with Martin Froy.

16 Recent Paintings at Arthur Tooth & Sons, London, include Acacia Road (the address of a friend), Anthony Hill and Gillian Wise and Brigid Seagrave.

Shows new paintings at Kasmin Limited, London. For the first time he abandons canvas for a wooden support in Indian Subject (Blue), 1965-9.

Trustee of the Tate Gallery

First solo show abroad with 8 pictures at the Gallerie Müller, Cologne, Germany, including David Hockney Drawing, Mr and Mrs Peter Blake and his portrait of Ron Kitaj, R.B.K.

    Shows recent paintings at Kasmin Limited, London

    His impressions of India seen through windows and from trains emerge as Indian Views, 12 screenprints published by Leslie Waddington Prints, London. More Indian Views, 5 lithographs, are published by Bernard Jacobson in 1976.

    Kasmin hires a chateau in Carennac, France for the summer and invites artists he represents to bring their families.

Participates in Patrick Caulfield, Howard Hodgkin, Michael Moon at the Galerie Stadler, Paris.

At the age of 41 H makes his American debut at the Jill Kornblee Gallery in New York with 9 paintings: ‘they realized at once what sort of artist I was when I first showed in New York’, he told Edward Lucie-Smith in 1981, ‘…the reaction was such that I felt I was communicating with an audience. I’ve rarely felt that in England.’ In New York he will later show with Andre Emmerich, Lawrence Rubin at Knoedler and with Gagosian.

He shows nine recent paintings at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Dartington Hall, Devon, including Talking about Art, the first picture in which he leaves parts of the wooden surface unpainted.                                                                               

Acute depression is finally recognized as a symptom of amoebic hepatitis, contracted in India eight years previously. Recovers and returns to India as one of 3 British artists in the 3rd Indian Triennale in Delhi. Becomes a friend of Foy Nissen of the British Council in Bombay and visits the studio of Jamini Roy.

Separates from his wife and acknowledges his homosexuality.

Appointed CBE. Artist in residence for a year at Brasenose College, Oxford

Shows 9 new paintings at Waddington Galleries, London

Awarded second prize at the 10th John Moore’s Liverpool Exhibition for Cafeteria at the Grand Palais.

First retrospective exhibition Forty-five Paintings, 1949-1975 opens at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Richard Morphet writes in the catalogue. Works include Bombay Sunset and Small Durand Gardens, where Morphet then lived.

Makes a print, After Luke Howard, for a bicentennial portfolio tribute, For John Constable, published by Bernard Jacobson, along with works by Peter Blake, Bill Brandt, Barry Flanagan, Duncan Grant, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Richard Smith and others. Luke Howard, a distant relation, after whom H was named, wrote the Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803), that inspired Constable’s cloud studies.  www.cloudman.com/luke_howard3.htm

For the first time H applies paint to a print, Julian and Alexis. He also asks his son Sam to help him colour the edition, under his supervision. From now on he will add hand colouring to all his prints.

Foy Nissen’s Bombay hangs in the Hayward Annual. Current British Art Selected by Michael Compton, Howard Hodgkin and William Turnbull.

Buys a flat in a house near the British Museum. Eventually buys the rest of the building and the former dairy behind the house, which becomes a studio.

Meets Nick Underwood, a friend of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, and visits him in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Underwood attends Oral Roberts University. Creates a series of prints for Petersburg Studios, Nick, A Furnished Room, Jarid’s Porch, Nick’s Room and Storm, as well as paintings such as Lawson Underwood & Sleep, Jealousy and a gouache, A Storm.  Lawson’s comment on a living room in a Tulsa suburb inspired H’s print Here we are in Croydon.

Trustee of the National Gallery, London. He strongly supports the acquisition of Degas’ Helene Rouart in herFather’s Study.

Selects work from the National Gallery’s collection for an exhibition in their series The Artist’s Eye. Renoir’s Dancing Girlwith Castanets and Dancing Girl with Tambourine flank the entrance against yellow backgrounds. ‘English people don’t seem to like these paintings much’, he comments in the catalogue so he installs banks of red geraniums underneath them to help people see them better. He brings up the fragments of Manet’s Execution of Maximilian I from the reserve collection in order to assemble them on one canvas (as a previous owner, Degas, had done) and installs Tiepolo’s ceiling panel as a ceiling panel. Both innovations persist. His plan to cover the room’s walls with bright, floral patterned, Indian cotton is not realized for ‘technical reasons’. Instead works by Velazquez (without its ‘hideous frame’), Mantegna, Fabritius and others hang on walls covered in navy blue bunting. The series always includes works by the artist; H hangs Dinner at Smith Square and Mr and Mrs E.J.P as well as a Moghul miniature, a page from the Hamzanama, Mihrdukt shoots at the ring. Catalogue includes H’s introduction and comments and an appreciation by Alistair Smith. 165,000 people came to the show, an attendance figure ‘equalled only by Titian’s Portraits’, the director Michael Levey tells H in a letter of 28 August 1979.

Visits David Hockney in Los Angeles with Peter Blake and keeps a Journal. After omelettes at the Sidewalk, (‘P.B’s a Jack Kerouac, mine…a Gertrude Stein. Both revolting’), they visited Disneyland: ‘DH admired Pirates of the Caribbean. A plunge by boat into a dark river with treasure and cities being pillaged, a skeleton sitting in bed reading a map through a magnifying glass, a harbour full of slaves and whores all life-size, life-like and in motion…The Life of Snow White which was poor, described by PB as an early work.’ Extracts were printed in Ambit 83, 1980++ H’s paintings of DH in Hollywood and prints of David’s Pool and David’s Pool at Night refer to this visit. Peter Blake evokes the trip in A Remembered Moment in Venice, California 1981–91and the encounter with David Hockney in The Meeting or Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney 1981-3. That also refers ironically to La rencontre, ou Bonjour M. Courbet of 1854, in which Courbet’s wealthy art patron and servant behind him salute the Assyrian-bearded artist.

The Moon hangs in The Hayward Annual...Selected by John Hoyland

First South Bank Show for London Weekend Television, directed by Verity Bargate.

Designs sets and costumes for Night Music, choreographed by Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert.

First show with Lawrence Rubin at Knoedler’s Gallery, New York. 12 works include The Moon (bought by R.B.Kitaj). Catalogue includes an essay by Lawrence Gowing: ‘Absorbed in the simultaneous flat-and-deep of Hodgkin’s colour one no longer seeks to decode it. One dwells in it for itself; in its presence, one is in its company.'

'I think there are some artists who certainly should get out of the studio a little bit more often’, H tells Edward Lucie-Smith in an interview for BBC Radio 3 (printed in Quarto, 1981). ‘I mean I know in my case that my work is entirely sustained by experiences of one sort or another. Somebody once said, “well, you must have to live like a novelist to paint pictures like this.” Which is true.’

H is included in A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy. Talking to Alan Woods in 1998 H commented, ‘Painting still remains alive, as an activity, in a way that, when I was young, would have seemed ridiculous. Pompier painting, as it was called, has come back with a bang – huge subject pictures. Think of Kiefer’s work alone, but anyone who saw the exhibition would have seen how much it was the old spirit of painting – pictures that would have made Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists turn in their graves. Enormous subject pictures which, as physical objects, were often produced in the most perfunctory manner possible, that were big and were in your face, comparable to these huge machines in the Paris Salons which I was brought up, I think quite rightly, to despise.’

Gives the William Townsend Memorial Lecture at the Slade School of Fine Art (reprinted in The Burlington Magazine, 1982). A distinguished sculptor walks out, when H talks about money. See 'How to be an Artist' in Interviews & Resources.

With Geeta Kapur co-curates Six Indian Painters at the Tate Gallery, including Jamini Roy and Bhupen Khakhar.

Indian Leaves, pairs of images created in Ahmedabad by staining textile dye directly onto newly handmade paper, opens at the Tate Gallery. Michael Compton, H and Bruce Chatwin contribute to the catalogue.

A 40 minute Arts Council film by Judy Marle, ‘Howard Hodgkin in Conversation with David Sylvester’, opens in his studio in Wiltshire and includes a visit to India, and conversations with Bhupen Khakhar and Foy Nissen.

Exhibition with Lawrence Rubin at Knoedler’s, New York. Works include After Corot.

Meets E.J.Power (1899-1993), a fellow trustee of the Tate Gallery, who collects paintings by Jackson Pollock and commissions a series of family portraits from Hodgkin.

With Terence McInerney selects 16th to 19th century Indian Drawings for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London and writes notes in the catalogue.

Travels to Egypt with McInerney and attends a son et lumiere performance at the pyramids.

Represents Britain at the XLI Venice Biennale with 24 paintings. He has the pavilion’s neo-classical interior painted eau de Nil green. Forty Paintings then travels to the Philips Collection, Washington, D.C., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover and reopens the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The catalogue includes an essay by John McEwen and an interview with David Sylvester: ‘To be an honest artist now, you have to make your own language, and for me that has taken a very long time. Gradually, as you make your own language, the more you learn to do the more you can do, and the more you include….I think for obvious reasons I will never succeed, but I would like to be…a classical artist…where all emotion, all feeling turns into a beautifully articulated anonymous architectural monument at the other end’. Meets Antony Peattie with whom he still lives. Takes a studio in Cardiff for five years. Paintings from this period include Down in the Valleys.

Shows 12 paintings at Knoedler’s, New York, including Clean Sheets, Waking up in Naples, Passion, None But the Brave Deserves the Fair and Egypt.

Meets Antony Peattie with whom he still lives. Takes a studio in Cardiff for five years. Paintings from this period include Down in the Valleys.

Nigel Finch directs a film on H for BBC TV’s Arena.

The Arts Council organises a touring exhibition, Four Rooms, in which four artists are commissioned to make a room. H designs fabric (printed by Warner's) for sofas, chairs and walls, as well as stained plywood tables and bronze lamps, manufactured by Ron Aram. He has the lamps programmed to dim and brighten at intervals.

A conversation with Patrick Caulfield is printed in Art Monthly.

Nominated for first Turner Prize, H hangs Son et Lumiere in the Tate display. The prize was awarded to Malcolm Morley.

Awarded the second Turner Prize. Exhibits A Small Thing But My Own (1983-85) in the Tate show.

The Tate Gallery shows 25 of his Prints 1977-1983. Richard Morphet writes in the catalogue.

Cinda Sparling in New York hand colours a pair of prints, David’s Pool and David’s Pool at Night (both printed by Aldo Crommelynck in Paris), which begins a fruitful collaboration: she goes on to hand colour DH in Hollywood, Moonlight and Black Moonlight, Red Eye, One Down, Two to Go, Bleeding, Mourning, Blood and Sand, among other prints

Exhibits 17 new paintings at Knoedler Gallery, New York, including Blue Palm, Venice Evening, View from Venice, In a Crowded Room and Sad Flowers.

Works for the first time with Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop, Wiltshire on a print, Green Room.  The partnership continues for the next 24 years.

Commissioned by Tricia Guild of Designers Guild to design textiles: Leaf and Large Flower are printed on glazed chintz; Moss and Earth on cotton satin.

Designs sets and costumes for Pulcinella, choreographed by Richard Alston for Ballet Rambert. Filmed by Bob Lockyer for the BBC it is now on DVD.

Makes Moon, a print in colour and in black and white for the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Appointed Honorary Fellow, Brasenose College, Oxford.

Designs a mural for the swimming pool in the Broadgate Centre (architect Peter Foggo; commissioned by Rosehaugh Stanhope), executed in Venetian glass mosaic.

Shows 13 New Paintings at Waddington Galleries in his first show in a London commercial gallery since 1971, including Dinner at Palazzo Albrizzi, In Bed in Venice, Venetian Glass and Love Letter. It was also seen at Knoedler’s, New York.

Designs set and costumes for Piano, choreographed by Ashley Page for the Royal Ballet.

British Council tours 27 Small Paintings to the Musée des Beaux Arts, Nantes; Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin. Henry-Claude Cousseau writes in the catalogue.

Shows 14 new paintings at Michael Werner’s gallery, Cologne, Germany and at Knoedler’s, New York, including Rain and Venice in the Autumn. Wilfried Dickhoff and Timothy Hyman write in the catalogues.

Makes a poster for the London Underground of Highgate Ponds. (http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/LTM/Posters/Artists/Product/Highgate-Ponds.html)

Makes Ivy, a large, oval intaglio print at 107 Workshop, Wiltshire. It was commissioned by Chris Corbyn and Jeremy King for their new restaurant, The Ivy, where it hangs.

Creates hand-coloured engravings for Susan Sontag’s story The Way We Live Now (first printed in the New Yorker, 1986), that are published by Karsten Schubert and in facsimile by Jonathan Cape. Proceeds go to Aids charities in Britain and America.

Designs a silk scarf for Marion Boulton Stroud’s Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shown there in New Dimensions: Artists Design Scarves, 26 November 26, 1991 - January 4, 1992, curated by Dilys Blum, Philadelphia Museum of Art Curator of Costume and Textiles

Indian Paintings and Drawings from H’s collection opens at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. and tours to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Rietberg Museum, Zurich; the British Museum, London and the Museo del Castelvecchio, Verona. The catalogue includes essays by Andrew Topsfield and Milo Beach and H’s ‘Notes on the collection’. ‘For an artist there are certain elements of scale, form, and colour that are beyond verbal description. In Indian painting I have found much that for me could not be found anywhere else, but I cannot tell you what – I can only metaphorically wave my arms at the pictures – and say look!’ (From an article in Asian Art, IV, 4, 1991)

Knighted.

Seven Small Pictures opens at the British School in Rome.

Outing Art: the BBC Billboard Art Project (directed by Sheree Folkson, and shown on television during the week of 17 May). invites H (along with Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Michael Landy and others), to make billboard-sized art. He paints A Small Thing Enlarged. (See film)

Designs a mural for the front of the new British Council headquarters in New Delhi, architect Charles Correa. It evokes the shadows cast by a tree and is executed in black stone and white marble.

Makes Put Out More Flags, a print to benefit the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Artists’ Fund.

To celebrate a friend's 60th birthday H flies to Cairo in order to travel down the Nile. He agrees to see in dawn at the pyramids but refuses to climb one.

First show at the Anthony D’Offay galleries, London, also seen at Knoedler’s, New York. 24 paintings include After Degas, Keith and Kathy Sachs, Lovers, Venice Sunset, Snapshot and Fisherman’s Cove. Catalogue includes a conversation with the artist: ’I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.’

The catalogue also includes his choice of extracts from Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, Stendhal, Anita Brookner, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, G.K.Chesterton, Bruce Chatwin, Evelyn Waugh and Horace Walpole: ‘’tis pity we ever imported from the continent ideas of summer: nature gave us coal mines in lieu of it, and beautiful verdure, which is inconsistent with it, so that an observation I made 40 years ago, is most true, that this country exhibits the most beautiful landscapes in the world when they are framed and glazed, that is, when you look at them through the window.’ 

The first monograph on H’s work appears, written by Andrew Graham-Dixon. It includes 13 ‘Artist’s Statements’ and texts.

Anthony D’Offay hangs a new painting, After Morandi for one evening in his house at 242 East 52nd Street, New York, designed by Philip Johnson.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs

38 works are featured in Paintings 1975—1995 at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Kunstverein fur die Rheinlände und Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the Hayward Gallery, London. The catalogue features essays by Michael Auping and Susan Sontag, an exchange of letters with John Elderfield and a catalogue raisonné by Marla Price. At the Hayward Gallery H has all the later, internal walls removed (for the first time since the building was opened) and the walls painted mailbag grey. David Sylvester installs the show and a credit appears on a wall panel, perhaps for the first time. The hand-list includes an essay by Bruce Bernard.

Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and Howard Hodgkin: Paintings from the 60s and 70s opens at Waddington Galleries, London. Alison Jacques writes in the catalogue.

H’s Venice prints are hung in the Kunsthalle, Winterthur in a space shared with Anya Gallaccio, who garlands it with scarlet gerbera (365 Gerbera (chateau)). The curator Roman Kurzmeyer writes in the catalogue for Where You Were Even Now, ‘For me, the veiled or hidden depths in Hodgkin’s work present a promise, and their painted frames offer an embrace.’

Illustrates Julian Barnes’s short story Evermore, first printed in Cross Channel, with a series of hand coloured etchings, published by Palavan Press and in paperback by Penguin.

A.M.Homes interviews H for Artforum.

Second South Bank Show directed by Melissa Raimes.

Awarded Shakespeare Prize by Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg. Predecessors include Graham Greene, Julian Barnes, Dame Janet Baker, David Hockney and Philip Larkin. Dr Raimund Stecker gives the Laudatio.

Shows 12 paintings at Galerie Lawrence Rubin, Zurich, Switzerland, including Haven’t We Met? Of Course We Have, In Coconut Grove, Stormy Weather and Alpine Snow. Catalogue includes an essay by Georg Imdahl.

Interviewed by William Feaver for ‘Mind’s Eye’, H talks about Mondrian, Sickert, Liotard, Matisse and Degas.

Designs backcloths for Mark Morris Dance Group’s Rhymes with Silver.

First exhibition with Gagosian Gallery: shows 13 works at Madison Avenue gallery including Old Sky, Chez Max and Rain. Catalogue includes James Fenton’s poem In Paris with You, an extract from Somerset Maugham’s The Alien Corn and Doris Lockhart Saatchi’s essay on Max Gordon.

New paintings at Haas & Fuchs Gallery, Berlin. Alan Woods writes in the catalogue.

Shows 22 paintings at Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London, including Night and Day and After Matisse. James Fenton writes in the catalogue.

Paints an image of an eye, which is enlarged photographically to cover the entire outside wall of the new circular Imax Cinema on Waterloo Roundabout, London.

Paints an image for the Royal Mail, used on the 64p millennium stamp.

Awarded Honorary Doctorate by the University of Oxford.

Designs backcloth for Holst’s opera Savitri, staged in the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

For the National Gallery’s Encounters show, exhibits Seurat’s Bathers, his version of Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, next to the original. 
‘Although their general disposition has been retained, the figures seem emotional recollections of Seurat's men and boys beside the Seine but without Wordsworthian "tranquillity." Instead, a swoosh of erotic energy runs through Hodgkin's version, epitomized by the splashes of blue between the boys in the river. There is no doubt about the source in Seurat, but the result is unmistakably Hodgkin, fusing memory and sensuousness, abandon and control, all bathed in the anxieties of influence.’ (Richard Shone, ArtForum International, 1 May 2000)

10 paintings are hung among the works in the Dulwich Picture Gallery Collection.  The catalogue includes an essay by Judy Collins. “There are only 10 pictures in this show, but each one carries its own weight, and each is saying and doing something different. It's an amazing achievement.” (Richard Dorment, The Daily Telegraph, 11 July 2001)

11 new small prints go on display at the Alan Cristea Gallery, Cork Street, London, among them, Eye; You Again; Rain; Dawn; Tears, Idle Tears; Away and Cigarette.

Philadelphia Collects Howard Hodgkin opens at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In celebration of H’s 70th birthday the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art shows 20 of H’s Large Paintings 1984—2002. They include Lovers, Dinner in Palazzo Albrizzi, Sad Flowers, Rain and Snapshot .To unify the spaces in the Dean Gallery, two rectangular rooms linked by a bridge, H has the walls painted ultramarine. Catalogue includes essays by Robert Rosenblum and Richard Kendall.

For the Galleries Show at the Royal Academy, London Gagosian takes the large rotunda, where H shows eight small paintings, among them, Mud, Dirty Weather and Low Tide against walls of ultramarine.

Designs backcloth for Mark Morris Dance Group’s Kolam.

    The Aldeburgh Festival stages a new production of Savitri, reuses H’s backcloth and exhibits his stage designs at the Peter Pears Gallery in a setting devised by Patrick Kinmonth. The catalogue includes an essay by John-Paul Stonard.

Made a Companion of Honour.

Publication of Howard Hodgkin Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, with an introduction by Nan Rosenthal and a conversation between the editor Liesbeth Heenk and H.

Shows 38 new paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea, New York, including Echo, Spring, The Body in the Library, Undertones of War, Italy, Come into the Garden, Maud and Eclipse. The catalogue includes essays by Julian Barnes and David Anfam. Most works go on to Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles.

Shows new work at the Galerie Haas & Fuchs, Berlin

Attends the burial of Susan Sontag in Montparnasse cemetery, Paris.

Finishes Flowerpiece; Listening; In the Bedroom; Eclipse; In Venice; Supper; Art; An Italian Landscape; One Damn Thing After Another; First Light; Poison Ivy; Ultramarine; Visitors; After Samuel Palmer and 48 Clarendon Road.

Shows small paintings at the Galerie Lutz & Thalmann, Zurich.

Retrospective exhibition of paintings curated by Enrique Juncosa and Nicholas Serota starts at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, where it’s opened by Seamus Heaney. It then tours to Tate Britain, London and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. The catalogue, edited by Nicholas Serota, includes an essay by James Meyer; notes on painting processes and materials; a chronology and bibliography. At Tate H has the walls painted with thin layers of blue, yellow and brown and in the final rooms the walls are covered with sheets of gold paper. Writers on Howard Hodgkin published by Irish Museum of Modern Art and Tate Publishing features new essays by Colm Tóibín and Enrique Juncosa and reprints essays by Bruce Chatwin, Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, William Boyd and James Fenton.

    Barbican Art Gallery starts a tour of selected prints at Laing Art Gallery,Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, which goes to Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; Winchester Discovery Centre; Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Manchester and PM Gallery, Ealing, London. David Acton, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at Worcester Art Museum, Mass. writes in the catalogue. Barbican International Enterprises plan further tours for the exhibition, which has been seen by over 54,000 people.

     Designs backcloths for Mark Morris Dance Group’s Mozart Dances, which opens at Lincoln Center, New York and then tours to Vienna, London, Chicago, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Toronto, Aukland, Washingon, Seattle, Montpellier, Tel Aviv and Boston.

Paintings 1992-2007 1 February – 1 April at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (designed by Louis I. Kahn) tavels to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 24 May – 23 September. It includes Afternoon Flowers, Bamboo, Old Sky, After Vuillard, Silence, Moonlight, Autumn, The Body in the Library and Mud. Paintings hang against Kahn’s raw silk in New Haven and partly on gold paper in Cambridge. The catalogue includes an essay by Richard Morphet.

Twenty new paintings shown at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London WC1, include House and Garden, Blushing and Degas’ Dancers, In Egypt, Artist and Model and four large paintings, Home, Home on the Range; Where the Deer and the Antelope Roam; Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word and And the Skies are Not Cloudy All Day. The catalogue prints Seamus Heaney’s speech opening the Dublin show and a new essay by Alan Hollinghurst.

Howard Hodgkin & Edgar Degas at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in which An Early Landscape is paired with La femme de Candaules.

Whitechapel Gallery commissions a new print, Sunset (copperplate sugarlift in 5 colours, handpainted in acrylic in 4 colours) as the Whitechapel Gift: all proceeds go to the gallery’s education programmes.

Makes his largest prints yet, As Time Goes By, referring to the song in Casablanca, 1942 (written by Hermann Hupfeld for a revue in 1931): 'You must remember this /A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. /The fundamental things apply /As time goes by.' They are made of five separate sheets and add up to 20' in length and are in two colour ways, red and blue. Alan Cristea, who publishes them, shows them along with some of H's previous, large prints, the Venice series, Into the Woods and Frost. 

Exhibits Seven New Paintings at Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, London W1. The windows are covered in gauze and on the walls painted in soft grey hang Sky, Leaf, In the Train, Embrace, Rain on the Pane, Folk Art and Green Thoughts. Lawn hangs in the inner room.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford exhibits 20 of H's Indian paintings and drawings of elephants, that are on loan.

Meanwhile Modern Art Oxford shows 25 of his paintings 2001-2010 in an exhibition called Time and Place, curated by the director, Michael Stanley. The last painting, Blood, arrives too late to be included in the catalogue. The same building, then called Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, housed H's first retrospective of 45 paintings in 1976, curated by Nicholas Serota.

The exhibition tours to the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands, which is directed by Hendrik Driessen. He is also responsible for the installation. It runs from 2 October 2010 to 16 January 2011.

Stefan Kuiper writes in Vrij Nederland, 28 August 2010: 'In the past, until about ten years ago, [Hodgkin] worked on the basis of personal memories, and his paintings bore titles such as In Paris With You (1995-1996) and In Raimund Stecker's Garden (1998-2001). His art was private, confessional; as though all sorts of intimate acknowledgements could be found among the enigmatic forms. Those paintings were highly personal theaters (the broad, paint-spattered frame resembling the entrance to a stage) in which the painter brought his memories to life. Paint had become Proust's madeleine. Hodgkin's new work is different, less private. That can be discerned in the titles—Lawn, Big Lawn, Sky—but also in the form. The small and intimate panel Leaf (2007-2009), for instance,  involves no more than a single sharply curled sweep of thinned green against a background of plain wood. And Mud (2002) is a unprepared plank covered with wide strokes of green and grey. Though it consists of practically nothing, somehow this little picture effortlessly gives rise to associations with landscapes and shoals, or an approaching storm. These paintings are more suggestive than Hodgkin's earlier work, less insistent, and consequently better. The difference resembles that between people who give energy—Hodgkin fondly refers to his paintings as a cast of characters—and those who take it. Between inhaling and exhaling.

'The question is whether the painter himself sees it that way. Hodgkin nods eagerly when I present him with my interpretation. That new approach to the work, he says, has to do with added confidence ("I used to be afraid of boring the viewer") but also with a new method. "Painting, to me, meant plodding away endlessly. I spent entire days turning things around and around in a painting. Plenty of pentimenti were carried out before I felt satisfied with the work. At a certain point I had had enough of that. It became too strenuous, especially with my difficult knees.

"Nowadays I work differently, with circumspection, more like a chess player. I'd say that about ninety percent of the time in my studio is spent on a contemplation and analysis of the work, and only ten percent on actually painting it. So when I sit there staring at the wall, I'm in fact hard at work." His eyes twinkle mischievously: "Explaining that to my assistants took quite some time."'