Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy has lived and worked in Santa Monica, California for more than six decades. In 1953, Don Bachardy met the renowned British literary figure, Christopher Isherwood, on the beach in Santa Monica, and they remained a devoted couple until the author’s death in 1986. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a mecca for artists, writers, and musicians visiting from abroad. Since then, Bachardy has become one of the most celebrated portrait artists of our time, always working from life, never from photographs. His illustrious subjects include Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Igor Stravinsky, Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha, Jack Nicholson, Allen Ginsberg, Katherine Hepburn, Elton John, and Francis Bacon, among many others.

He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. Bachardy’s work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. Bachardy’s portraits reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the M.H. de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, the University of Texas, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, Princeton University, the California State Capitol Building, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.