'If his face looks like this...'

Yesterday's announcement of David Hockney's death was greeted by a wonderful outpouring of affectionate and admiring tributes – and quite right too. He was that rare thing, a genuine artist who was also widely popular and well-liked – the equivalent in painting, perhaps, of John Betjeman in poetry. Not easy to think of another, in either field, with such a combination of attributes...
  I've always loved Hockney's drawings, perhaps rather more than his paintings – certainly more than his late paintings, cheering though they are. The above pen drawing of Auden is a favourite – so economical in means, yet so perfectly capturing the man. Hockney has wisely simplified the prodigious reticulation of wrinkles that covered the ageing Auden's face, giving it the appearance, as he put it himself, of 'a wedding cake left out in the rain'. I wonder – well, I don't really, but you never know – if the lyricist Jimmy Webb had that phrase in mind when he wrote that totally bonkers song 'MacArthur Park': 

'MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain,
And I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again.
Oh no!
Oh no!'
(Check out the full lyrics here to savour just how bonkers this song is. I particularly like the line 'Like a striped pair of pants' in the first stanza.)

   To return to Auden's face, Hockney recalled that, when drawing it, he kept thinking, 'If his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?' 
  Scientific Postscript: Some medical experts believe that the state of Auden's face was due to a rare genetic condition known as Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome. But many years of heavy smoking, supplemented by alcohol and benzedrine, can't have helped.