BRADFORD, ENGLAND — Artist David Hockney died on Thursday at the age of 88, his publicist Erica Bolton confirmed. No cause of death was provided.

He was born in Bradford, England, on July 9, 1937, the fourth of five children in a working-class family. His father was an accountancy clerk, and his mother was a Methodist. In 1957, he sold a portrait of his father for £10 at the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition.

He served two years of national service as a hospital orderly, identifying as a conscientious objector. In 1959, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London. The Royal College of Art awarded him a diploma after he submitted a drawing of a male figure from a physique magazine rather than writing a required final essay. Art dealer John Kasmin began representing him in 1961. He visited New York the same year and formed a friendship with Andy Warhol.

He relocated to California in 1964. He recalled his impressions of California in a 2009 television interview, stating, "Strong shadows meant a lot of sun. So I thought, well, wherever that is, it's always sunny." In a biography, he said, "I thought people who produced such work must live in color, so I went in search of it. I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the industrial north. Here I felt free." He divided his time among Los Angeles, London, and Paris throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1985, he attended a White House dinner with President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana and was delayed by security for arriving on foot. His 1972 painting, "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)", sold at auction for $90.3 million in November 2018, setting a record for the highest price paid for a work by a living artist at that time.

He moved back to the coastal town of Bridlington, England, in the late 1990s and relocated from California to Yorkshire in 2005. He painted landscapes in the Yorkshire Wolds region for a decade, and these paintings served as the basis for a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey. In a television interview, he said, "You don't retire doing this. You just do it until you fall over."

He utilized various modern technologies, including fax machines, photocopiers, printers, and iPads, to create and share digital paintings throughout his career. In 2012, he experienced a stroke that temporarily impaired his speech, but he continued to produce artwork following the event. His assistant, Dominic Elliott, died at his Bridlington residence in 2013 at age 23. He purchased a farmhouse in Normandy, France, in 2018 and produced a 90-meter-long frieze titled "A Year in Normandie."