Picture Of A Landscape In An Elaborate Gold Frame, 2
Signed Print

Picture Of A Landscape In An Elaborate Gold Frame by David Hockney is a signed lithograph dating to 1965. Part of the series named A Hollywood Collection, it is accompanied by five other prints of similar style and subject. Here we see Hockney employing the trompe l’oeil device to produce a ‘play within a play’ effect that he had been experimenting with in earlier prints and paintings and would return to throughout his career. The work is ostensibly a representation of a tree however the viewer is distanced from the subject by the elaborate gold frame of the title which suggests we are looking at a picture of a picture of a tree. In this way Hockney refers back to the old masters before him by using a trope from art history to give the impression that we are being shown the fictional collection of a Hollywood star, at the same time offering a meta commentary on representation and collecting. This deliberate artifice is then juxtaposed with the natural element of the tree. As well as being a striking print the work hints at Hockney’s playful side, his admiration for the lineage of artists that came before him and his desire to see himself as part of a canon.