‘He outlived his four doctors’: David Hockney loved to smoke, he loved to smoke | David Hockney

DAvid Hockney’s last painting that was shown during his stay, in 2025 at the Paris exhibition, has Droste’s effect: the picture has a picture that the picture has a picture. Between the fingers of one hand, a paint brush; the other, cigarettes. He would be smoking, smoking and smoking forever. That’s the basic truth of this work, and even though that wasn’t really true – he died this week, aged 88 – he was very successful.

The picture is called Play inside a Play with Me and a Cigarette, and it made him known by the authorities of the Paris Metro, who said that his photo cannot be used to advertise the show, because it is against the law – it is a well-known rule that you are not allowed to attract smoking for fear of attracting young people. “The boss of those who control our lives knows no bounds,” he said at the time. “Art has always been a way of expressing freedom and this is a wrong (choice).”

Bossiness was his bête noir – he often wore a badge that read: “End childhood soon.” Whether the work really embellished the habit is an open question since, despite being neatly dressed, Hockney did not appear impudent.

There’s a wonderful picture of him at the Royal College of Art in 1962, stocky, shirt and tie like a boy just out of grammar school, covered in paint, deep in thought, smoking. He did not have a good time at RCA, where his colleagues mocked Bradford’s voice. “I was just looking at their paintings,” he said later, “and I thought, if I could paint like that, I would keep my mouth shut.”

Undoubtedly, if you look at smoking as a means of socializing, you can see its lifelong tendency towards this initial isolation. Freud would argue that it was against Hockney’s father, who abhorred the practice years before medical science helped him. Hockney Snr died of a heart attack and, although the two were very close, David Hockney often mentioned the chocolate biscuits that apparently killed him.

Smoking would be a form of makeup, to join the ranks of other smokers – Picasso, Monet – whom Hockney revered as the fathers of the fag. But if you see the way he did, you wouldn’t need excuses. He smoked because he loved smoking, and he did it all the time.

For most of his smoking life, his only enemies were doctors, who told him to stop: he liked to survive (he saw four). He came out in the 1950s, after seeing a performance by the Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev, which he later said, “he was gay and he admitted it, and I thought that’s what I’m going to do, just admit it.” He later reflected on how we are becoming more and more tolerant of heterosexuality, but especially distinguishing them from the oppression of smokers. “I’ve always known that I’m gay, but I know that there are few. Most men want to have sex with women, that’s all they think about. So if there are few, you have to tolerate. You don’t have to continue smoking because it’s intolerable. To tolerate something, means you won’t like it.” He used to keep 2,000 noses at home “for emergencies”.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s, when a campaign began to ban smoking in pubs, that Hockney began to put his shoulder behind him as an irrevocable right. He protested at the Labor conference in 2005, accompanied by signs saying “Death comes to us all” (this was at the height of the Iraq war, so Tony Blair arrived with the same message, albeit a different one).

Hockney wrote to the Guardian regularly, with the same message. In 2004, he was questioning the medical profession about this: “Can the doctors explain Mrs Thatcher’s life? Her husband was proud of the Senior Service, and he must have been used up. He is dead at 86, and he is still going. Please explain.” In 2007, when the ban went into effect, he he complained “An empty and unpleasant country” England had become, comparing it negatively if a little casually to the “Festspeilhaus in Baden Baden, during Tristan and Isolde, (where) I found a smoking place”.

The following year, he complained about the BBC and “smoke free policy”, Polly Toynbee, who denounced the Beeb but failed to name a sign of this persecution, and Dawn Primarolo, then health minister, were sadly “as clueless as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.” It was puzzling and perhaps even a one-off campaigner that he found enemies where there were none, just as Toynbee did until the 90s when he became a smoking gun hero.

It is not necessary to show that smoking is not great or wise, and Hockney’s long life would have been easier at the end of 2012. However, his last visit to art was with one of his patrons, Thomas Mufupi, a picture of warmth and respect so that it is impossible to imagine David Hockney not happy with his decision. It was his lifelong joy and, if he objected, it wouldn’t be fire without smoke.