Hockney has taken roughly a year to finish a double-portrait of Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell with their cat. Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy is as close as he gets to naturalism, in his own estimation. When the completed ten-by-seven foot work debuts at the National Portrait Gallery in London in March, Peter Quennell opines in the New York Times: “The picture is beautifully balanced; every detail is exactly spaced. David Hockney, we learn, painted one face no less than sixteen times, while a dozen separate re-paintings eventually fixed the view beyond the window.”

Hockney works with slow deliberation on a portrait commission—one of the few he will agree to in his lifetime—of the Royal Opera House’s director,[NESTED] Sir David Webster. He struggles with the task because of their lack of a personal relationship.

Over the course of the year, Hockney’s international jet-setting has him in Morocco, New York, Los Angeles, the Southwest of France, Hawaii, Japan, and Southeast Asia. He paints the remarkable Sur la Terrasse from an image taken in Marrakesh, of Peter Schlesinger observed from behind as he stands alone on a balcony at the hotel La Mamounia. Made during the period of their break up, Sur la Terrasse recalls Hockney’s L.A. images—that city’s light, strong shadows, and palm trees. Drawings of an altogether different feel result from going on holiday in the English Lake District with his parents.

In the deep grip of loneliness after Peter Schlesinger moves out of Powis Terrace, Hockney immerses himself in painting, working from morning till night. He is prolific. The canvases themselves often suggest absence, or his cerebral immersion in art history.

Filmmaker Jack Hazan begins documenting Hockney in his daily life—including the disintegration of his relationship with Schlesinger and subsequent intensity in the studio—and goes on to take three more years of footage for the feature A Bigger Splash (1974).