Howard Hodgkin was born in London, the son of a prominent artistic family. He studied at Camberwell College of Art and later at Bath Academy of Arts, where he returned later as a teacher.
Hodgkin’s pictures of friends and places attempt to capture the abstract qualities of a particular time, place and area and to make permanent in pictorial form the impermanence of feeling.
Howard Hodgkin is best known in India for his mural (reflecting on the plurality of India through its depiction of a banyan tree) which adorns the facade of the British Council building in New Delhi.