The Beverly Hills Housewife by James Cahill review – a trip inside Hockney’s world

Muse Betty Freeman sits at the centre of this sun-drenched book about art, eccentricity, and the spirit of Los Angeles David Hockney was 29 years old when he came to Betty Freeman’s house to photograph her swimming pool. Scouting locations for the pool paintings that would make him a household name, he took preparatory snaps of his partner, Peter Schlesinger, emerging naked from the water. And yet something about his aloof and quietly eccentric host, who dusted the hunting trophies while a handsome young man padded around her patio in the altogether, intrigued the artist. So he asked whether he might photograph her too, and she agreed. Completed a year later, Beverly Hills Housewife (1966/7) shows a beautiful woman standing outside a beautiful house. The scene is lit by an unbroken sun, her blond bob is undisturbed by any breeze, a lush fern sets off her popping pink dress. She is surrounded by the symbols of mid-century American prosperity: a chair by Le Corbusier, a tasteful modernist sculpture. We don’t need the title to know the place and time, because Hockney’s paintings have come to define them in our imagination: shimmering water and scattered light, bright colours and reflective surfaces, a clean and impassive contentment...