In the dull village

In the dull village is an etching and print made by David Hockney in 1966, one of series of illustrations for a selection of Greek poems written by Constantine P. Cavafy.

[1] Several of Hockney early works are inspired by Cavafy's poems, including the 1961 prints Kaisarion and all his beauty, of Caesarion, based on Cavafy's poems "Alexandrian Kings" and "Kaisarion",[2] Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, which quotes Cavafy's poems "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "The Mirror at the Entrance",[3] and a painting A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, exhibited at the Young Contemporaries student show in February 1962, sold by Hockney for £110 in 1964, and resold for $2.2 million (£1.3m) in 1989.

He worked on around 20 plates to illustrate 14 of Cavafy's poems chosen from a new English translation by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender.

In 1961–1963, he produced a series of 16 etchings as an updated version of Hogarths A Rake's Progress, and he followed his 1966-67 Cavafy suite with Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969).

[10] In 1968, the Arts Council made a short documentary film, Loves Presentation on the creation of the prints, directed by James Scott.