James Cahill’s book uses David Hockney’s 1966–67 portrait Beverly Hills Housewife to explore the artist, his collector and friend Betty Freeman, and the cultural allure of Los Angeles. The review finds it an elegant blend of anecdote and art history, showing how a seemingly polished image of mid-century wealth can suggest loneliness, performance and complicated personal relationships.

Cahill closely reads details including Freeman’s pink dress, modernist furnishings and an antelope trophy that visually doubles her face, recasting her as a cultured woman in an unhappy marriage. He also argues that Hockney adapted the composition of Renaissance annunciation scenes, placing Freeman in a Madonna-like role and illuminating the painter’s affinities with early Renaissance art. The reviewer’s reservation is that Hockney’s enclosed, sunlit worlds exclude harsher realities of 1960s Los Angeles, such as the Watts riots, smog and the Vietnam war.