The first time textile designer Celia Birtwell modelled for David Hockney, she was, she says, terrified. “Look, that’s a very nervous me,” she says, pointing to a 1969 ink drawing titled, simply, Celia in Paris. “We were in an apartment in Paris – I think it belonged to Tony Richardson. It was so tranquil but I was terrified of doing something wrong.”
Given this was to be the first of hundreds of portraits he made of her, she obviously did something right.
“Well, I always try to dress up for him. Here, you can see in this one,” she says, pointing to Celia, Carennac, April 1971. “That’s a secondhand dressing gown. I bought that when Ossie [Birtwell’s former husband, fashion designer, Ossie Clark] had a Bentley, because of course he did. We used to float off in it.”
Instead of floating around 1970s west London in a Bentley, Birtwell and I are sitting in the upstairs cafe of the National Portrait Gallery, looking through the catalogue for the forthcoming exhibition, David Hockney: Drawings from Life. It’s the first major exhibition of Hockney’s drawings for more than two decades and includes around 150 images drawn over many decades, but only of five people: his mother, the curator Gregory Evans, his printer Maurice Payne, Hockney himself and his most famous muse, Birtwell. “He’s a real intellectual, David, and that he chose me [for the show] is incredibly flattering,” says Birtwell, 78 and still as fresh and girlish as a lily. Despite her humility, she is as associated with Hockney as swimming pools, mainly because of his famous painting of her with Clark, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. A show of Hockney portraits without Birtwell would have felt as wrong as a celebration of Da Vinci without the Mona Lisa.
The drawing he made of Birtwell in her dressing gown is on the press release for the show, and no surprise: it shows off Hockney’s untouchable use of colour, the green chair playing against Birtwell’s outfit – colourful and patterned, once her signature style – and her bright eyeshadow. Hockney is so good at quietly conveying the emotion he feels for something, whether it’s his dazzled love for the California sunshine, or his poignant connection with the Yorkshire landscape in his glorious paintings of trees. Here, with the care he takes over Birtwell’s lovely face, you can feel his fondness for her.
But friendship also means being truly seen and accepting how the other person sees you. Being a muse still has rather sexily elegant connotations (despite plenty of reports from other artists’ muses over the years that the job is overrated), but there are downsides to being drawn by your friend over a lifetime, as you have to watch yourself age in real time. One portrait done only last November, in which Birtwell is drawn seated in a wicker chair, nearly made the two friends fall out.
“I said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, I would never wear those colours, and anyway, I think it’s really mean.’ We’re all vain, aren’t we? I think he was quite upset, actually!”
Has it put her off posing for him?
“It’s made me very wary! When I was young, the drawings were lovely. But as he says, we’re all getting older, so you’re going to see something that’s possibly quite, ‘Oh wow’ … But this one is nice. I like the smile, and he’s done it in quite a smart way,” she says fondly, looking at one that was also done last November. There are still good wows to be found in the present.
Birtwell never meant to be the most famous muse of the most famous living artist. “But then someone comes along and decides you’re quite good to look at and amusing to talk to, so you take on another persona,” she says. Not that they talk when she is posing: the experience is “very serious and very quiet”, so when she looks at the pictures what often comes to mind are the sounds she heard during the sitting: the lapping of a Los Angeles swimming pool, the rustle of the trees in a London garden, the shouts of Parisian schoolchildren. After all this time, she’s still surprised that Hockney wants to paint her at all, because she never thought of herself as pretty.
“But I did think of myself as attractive, which I guess helped with these,” she says, looking at the few nude ones she did for Hockney back in the 70s. “Life changes, doesn’t it? My brain, thinking about doing such a thing now, well, it’s inconceivable!”
I ask if Hockney being gay made her feel less objectified.
“I wouldn’t know, as nobody else has ever asked to draw me. But I never really think of him as gay.” Apart, she concedes, from the various men.
Birtwell and Hockney have been close friends for over half a century, when she spotted him in his signature bright colours in Portobello Market in 1969 and thought, “There’s an interesting guy.” Hockney needed a little more persuading, and initially when he came round he mainly spoke with Clark, and so Birtwell became friendly with Hockney’s then lover, Peter Schlesinger. When they broke up and Schlesinger formed a new relationship with the artist Eric Boman, Hockney relied on Birtwell to help him through the heartbreak.
“I was a good listener, and that’s really how he got to know me. You always need someone to talk to about what’s in your heart, and I think I played that role,” Birtwell says.
In fact, Clark had met Hockney long before Birtwell did. Clark and Birtwell, both from Lancashire, got together in Manchester, and when Clark won a shoe designing competition, he went off to New York, where he met Hockney, while Birtwell stayed in Notting Hill.
“Then Ossie came back and said, ‘I just can’t bear that world of gayness and everything, I want to be with you.’ I said, ‘Look, it will never work,’ but he was so charming and he rekindled my thoughts for him, and I was hooked.
“I think David was intrigued by him, because Ossie was very cheeky and clever, but I wouldn’t have thought they had an affair, ever. I just don’t think so,” she says, bustling a little in her seat as if she’d rather not think about it all.
Birtwell and Clark connected not just personally but artistically. Her cheering, art deco-influenced designs worked beautifully with his sinuous cuts, and the clothes they made together remain the ultimate fashion signifiers of Britain in the late 1960s and early 70s. Hockney’s painting of the two of them in their Notting Hill flat has frozen them in time as the embodiment of bohemian west London, although Birtwell remembers her neighbourhood then as “quite innocent and homespun. It wasn’t about money then. Ossie would do a collection for someone and they’d pay him by giving him a Mini.” Her life with Clark was, at first, wonderfully happy, but then it became very much not.
“He was drawn to me and I was completely potty about him. But he had a temper, and he became more difficult as it went on. He took [drugs] to stay slim, and then he took anything. But I don’t want to talk about the ending because it was too dreadful,” she says, doing her best not to cry.
After Birtwell took their two sons and left Clark in 1974, he spiralled down. In 1996 he was stabbed to death in his council flat by a former lover. “I don’t mind talking about him, because I want him to be remembered. But I became quite frightened of him. The way he lived was very depressing, and I just thought how did you go from something so brilliant to this?”
Does she mind being locked for ever in a painting with him?
“I don’t think of it like that, but I always feel slightly shy looking at it. I think, ‘Oh there’s me and Ossie, whatever, whatever.’ But I think he really captures Ossie in it very cleverly, because he could be quite petulant. I don’t know about me. I think I look a bit monumental.”
But she clearly is monumental to Hockney – after all, he stayed friends with her after the breakup, not Clark.
“I suppose that’s true,” she says. “I’ll always be known in a kind of trilogy, with Ossie and David. But you don’t see yourself like that, and I’ve always been cautious not to let my own talent be discarded. Like with David, I could’ve stopped working and just been his model. I could have been eaten up by the glamour of it all. But especially after the tragedy of Ossie, I made sure that didn’t happen and I’ve always explained to David that I had to stay independent, and possibly that’s kept the relationship rather healthy. Because I love David dearly, but you have to be independent to be in with him. He’d always be sympathetic [to your problems] but David’s work is who he is.”
These days, Birtwell lives with her long-term partner, Andrew Palmer, in west London, but no longer in Notting Hill (“Too many people building basements and parking in the middle of the road”). She still designs and her Instagram is split between images of her work and photos of her six grandchildren. She and Hockney have a fond and teasing relationship. She does a wonderful imitation of him and giggles at how he thinks he “discovered trees”: “Although he has made a big impression on me, how I see landscape now. But he’s not a person who would grow anything. Someone gave him some bonsai trees and I thought, ‘I wonder how long they’ll live!’”
Hockney lives in Normandy and LA and the two talk often. “But always by FaceTime with him, which sometimes isn’t brilliant when you’ve got your curlers in and you’re wearing your nightie. But he’s not vain, and if I phone him, his hair might be standing on end and he’ll be in his dressing gown, but he’ll have a nice smiley face,” she says, making a nice smiley face herself. Hockney’s portraits of Birtwell are not just of a person – they are of a friendship.
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David Hockney: Drawing from Life is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 27 February to 28 June.
