‘He outlived four of his doctors’: what was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?

David Hockney’s last self-portrait that went on show while he lived, in 2025’s Paris retrospective, has a Droste effect: the figure holds a picture in which the figure holds a picture. Between the fingers of one hand, a paintbrush; of the other, a cigarette. He could have been smoking and smoking and smoking into infinity. That’s the elemental truth of the work, and even while that turned out not to be literally true – he died this week, aged 88 – he gave it his best shot. The painting is titled Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, and it got him into a scrap with the authorities of the Paris Metro, who said a photo of it couldn’t be used to advertise the show, since it contravened regulations – it is a pretty common rule that you’re not allowed to glamorise smoking lest you influence the young. “The bossiness of those in charge of our lives knows no limits,” he said at the time. “Art has always been a path to free expression and this is a dismal [decision].” Hockney often mentioned what apparently killed his dad: chocolate biscuits Bossiness was his bête noir – he often wore a badge that said: “End bossiness soon.” Whether or not the work really did glamorise the habit is an open question since, although nattily dressed in houndstooth, Hockney didn’t exactly look in rude health. There is a wonderful photo of him at the Royal College of Art in 1962, thick set, dressed in a shirt and tie like a kid just arrived at grammar school, covered in paint, deep in concentration, smoking. He didn’t have a great time at the RCA, where peers mocked his Bradford accent. “I’d look at their artworks,” he said later, “and I’d think, well, if I drew like that, I’d keep my mouth shut.” Arguably, if you looked at smoking as a social crutch, you could trace his lifelong addiction to this early alienation. Freud might say it was a reaction against Hockney’s father, who loathed the habit years before medical science supported him. Hockney Snr died of a heart …