Howard Hodgkin valuation
Painted memories of rooms and encounters, in oil on wood, straight over the frame.
Howard Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, ran away from Eton twice, and trained at Camberwell and Bath.
What a work by Howard Hodgkin is worth
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Bio
Howard Hodgkin was born in London in 1932, ran away from Eton twice, and trained at Camberwell and Bath. He always insisted he was a representational painter, which puzzled people, because the pictures look abstract: what they represent is not a scene but the memory of one — a dinner, a conversation, a room in India, held in a few broad gestures of very saturated colour. He worked on wooden panels and boards, often old ones, and carried the paint out over the frame so the picture has no clean edge. He won the Turner Prize in 1985, was knighted in 1992 and died in 2017.
Hodgkin worked extremely slowly, sometimes for years on one small panel, so the output is limited and dates on the reverse frequently span a long period — that is original and not a sign of alteration. The painted frame is integral and reframing destroys value; original frames should never be replaced. He was a major printmaker, working in intaglio and lithography with hand colouring applied afterwards, so impressions within an edition genuinely differ. Alan Cristea published much of the later graphic work.
At a glance
- Born
- 6 August 1932, Hammersmith
- Died
- 9 March 2017, London
- Movement
- Contemporary art
The catalogues, and Absent Friends
The paintings are catalogued in Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings, edited by Marla Price, first published in 1995 and brought up to date in 2006 with more than 450 works, and the prints in Liesbeth Heenk's catalogue raisonné of 2003. Every Hodgkin print has a Heenk number, and it should be recorded with the impression.
Absent Friends, the first exhibition of his portraits, opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London in March 2017, two weeks after his death, with more than fifty works made between 1949 and the end of his life, a recently finished self-portrait among them.
Venice, Delhi and the Venetian Views
Hodgkin's first solo exhibition was in London in 1962, and he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1984, the year before the Turner Prize. He made designs for Richard Alston's ballets for Rambert, Night Music in 1981 and Pulcinella in 1987, and in 1992 he designed a mural of a spreading banyan tree for the front of Charles Correa's new headquarters for the British Council in Delhi. Tate Britain gave him a major exhibition in 2006.
Many of the hand-painted etchings were made with the master printer Jack Shirreff at 107 Workshop, and the Venetian Views of 1995 show the same view of Venice at four times of day. In October 2025 Mrs Acton in Delhi, painted between 1967 and 1971, set his auction record in London, and in March 2026 the government placed a temporary export bar on it so that a British institution could try to buy it.
Best auction results
- Mrs Acton in Delhi £1.7m
- Painted 1967 to 1971 · London · 16 October 2025
- Publicly reported
- A record for the artist at auction. The government placed a temporary export bar on it in March 2026.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
