David Hockney (b. 1937)

Myself and My Heroes was Hockney's first etching and shows the artist alongside Walt Whitman and Mahatma Gandhi. It was partly the influence of his fellow Royal College student, Kitaj, that encouraged the young Hockney to make art about the things that really interested him: literature, politics and people and their relationships. He admired Whitman's sympathies as a vernacular poet and Gandhi's pacifism and vegetarianism.

In 1961 Hockney was still unsure of his ability to depict figures; his solution was to use words: 'I have to make it clear, so I'll write Gandhi on this picture of Gandhi' he remarked in 1976, 'when you put a word on a [picture], it has a similar effect in a way to a figure; it's a little bit of human thing that you immediately read' (David Hockney, David Hockney, London, 1976).