The great British abstract painter Sir Howard Hodgkin has died aged 84 years old just a couple of weeks before a major show of his portraits opens at the National Portrait Gallery in London on 23 March.   Hodgkin was recognized as a central figure in contemporary art for over half a century, and the Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said he was “one of the great artists and colourists of his generation”.

Hodgkin who always knew he was gay, even when he married, in 1955 and later he left his wife. He has been with his  partner, the music writer Antony Peattie, since 1983 and they lived in a four-storey Georgian house in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum.  Sir Howard won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1985 and amongst the many honors he was awarded  was awarded the CBE in 1977,  knighted by the Queen  in 1992, and was made a Companion of Honour in the 2003 

Sir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH CBE (6 August 1932 – 9 March 2017)