
Richard Hamilton is a name forever associated with Pop Art. Although he never achieved the same level of fame of some of his contemporaries, he helped define and advance the movement, and his legacy can still be keenly felt today.
Richard Hamilton worked across painting, photography, collage, and printmaking, and his work is especially popular in the United Kingdom. It is prints which dominate his market, accounting for 75% of his work sold at auction, with the majority of them fetching between £1,000 and £5,000.
Richard Hamilton was one of Pop Art’s earliest pioneers, and in many ways, his life and work were shaped by the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Read on to discover five things you might not have known about Richard Hamilton.
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His Artistic Education Was Intermittent
Richard Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London, in 1922, and he left school with very few qualifications, although he attended art classes in the evening from the age of 12. He then attended the Royal Academy Schools for a time, but his studies were interrupted by World War II, during which time he worked as a technical draughtsman.
He re-enrolled in the RA schools after the war, but he was expelled in 1946 for “not profiting from the instruction being given”, and he then had to carry out his National Service. In 1948, he was accepted to the Slade by William Coldstream; it was here that Hamilton began experimenting with etching, resulting in his Reaper series, which was first exhibited in 1950 and remains popular to this day.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £260,000
Fashion-Plate (Cosmetic Study IX) is part of Hamilton’s 1969 Fashion-Plate series, which is made up of 12 unique works. The striking pieces are a combination of lithography, collage, pastels, acrylics, and cosmetics; each image depicts a studio background and a model created from a number of fragmented images, mostly taken from magazines. The series explores the mixture of artificiality and desirability of the fashion world and the products it markets, and it remains among Hamilton’s most famous today; Fashion-Plate (Cosmetic Study IX) was sold by Phillips in December 2013 for £260,000, surpassing its top estimate by £60,000.

He Admired Picasso
Richard Hamilton was a great admirer of Picasso, and he was delighted to be invited to contribute to a portfolio in honour of the Spanish artist’s 90th birthday in 1971. He faced the problem, though, that he “couldn’t see how you could pay homage to Picasso”, until he decided to include all of Picasso’s many styles in one image, which he called Picasso’s Meninas. To do this, he reworked Diego Velázquez’s famous 1656 painting, Las Meninas, replacing the figures with ones created in a mixture of Picasso’s different styles, and placing Picasso in the location that Velázquez originally occupied.
He’s Often Called The Father Of Pop Art
Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? is a collage Richard Hamilton created in 1956 for the This is Tomorrow exhibition. The exhibition mostly featured work by the Independent Group (IG), a collection of artists, architects, and writers who’d first convened a few years before, and who are often regarded as forerunners of Pop Art.
Hamilton’s collage is frequently credited as the first piece of Pop Art to achieve significant recognition, and it retains its iconic status to this day, lending its creator a special status in the movement. Hamilton also listed the “characteristics of Pop Art” in a letter in 1957, further cementing his reputation as ‘the father of Pop Art’. He wrote “Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at the youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big business.”
In this way, Richard Hamilton provided much of the framework Pop Art is based upon, and his art and writings often tried to capture, explain, and expand the movement. He was crucial to the establishment of Pop Art, paving the way for artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana.

He Was Part Of The ‘Swinging Sixties’ London Scene
Richard Hamilton’s art dealer in the ‘60s, Robert Fraser, was also known as ‘Groovy Bob’ because of the gatherings and parties he organised, and his London gallery and flat soon became famous focal points of the city’s ‘Swinging Sixties’ scene. Hamilton was, naturally, part of this circle, and he got to know many of the famous faces; it was he who designed the Beatles’ White Album cover, and he even made an appearance in Brian De Palma’s 1968 film, Greetings.
Most famously, Hamilton created a series titled Swingeing London (a play on ‘Swinging London’) in response to Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger’s 1967 arrests and subsequent trials. The arrests came after a notorious drugs bust at Keith Richards’ Sussex home, Redlands, when the authorities tried to crack down on the counterculture and recreational drug use embodied by the Rolling Stones and their associates. The event attracted lurid press coverage and generated a media feeding frenzy.
Hamilton made the series based on an iconic photograph of Jagger and Fraser handcuffed together in a police van, stating ““I had felt a strong personal indignation at the insanity of legal institutions which could jail anyone for the offence of self-abuse with drugs… Gradually, the sense of outrage subsided into quiet deliberations on the technical requirements of the expression of that anger.”