This untitled work from Patrick Hockey’s India series is an exceptional example of the artists work. Hockey, with his love of luxury and beautiful objects, fabrics, places and settings, found much of interest in India. He first visited the country in 1974, and stayed some time with the Maharaja of Khairagh and his sons. His time in India had a visible impact on his works: it was during this first stay that he began to move away from the dark, earthy colours which dominated the palette of his early works and begun to introduce bright pigments and a lighter overall feel into his paintings.

Hockey painted scenes which reflected things that he had directly experienced. This particular work was painted after a 1983 visit to India to attend the wedding of HH Maharaj of Jaipur. Its depiction of two splendidly sartorial Indian gentlemen posing with the body of a magnificent tiger is highly evocative of the magnificent sights Hockey was exposed to in India, so far removed from his early life on a cattle station in rural Queensland. It embodies many elements central to Hockey’s body of work: his love of travel and the exotic, his ability to capture the personalities of the people he depicted through the inclusion of a few well chosen details and his magnificent capacity for representing both pattern and landscape.

Patrick Hockey is represented in public collections including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, ANU, Northern Territory Art Gallery, University of Queensland, University of Western Australia, as well as numerous private collections including HRH Prince of Wales, Margaret Rockerfeller Collection (USA), Estee Lauder Collection (USA), HH Maharaj of Jaipur and the Sultan of Brunei.