David Hockney is the second Bradfordian to be appointed to the Order of Merit in the past 35 years.

The first was J B Priestley, in 1977, when the writer and broadcaster was in his 83rd year.

Hockney, already a Companion of Honour, will be 75 this July, the year of perhaps his biggest-ever solo exhibition, A Bigger Picture, which fills all 12 rooms at London’s Royal Academy.

The Order of Merit was founded in 1902 by King Edward VII and is the monarch’s personal acknowledgement of outstanding service to the arts, literature, the sciences, to culture generally, by anyone born in the Commonwealth. Hockney joins the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles, who are all OMs.

It is a feature of the award that only 24 people can be members of the order at any one time. In return for membership of this exclusive club, they may be asked to attend private dinners with the Royal family at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, from time to time.

In the 110 years of the OM’s existence, members have included artists Augustus John, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore; composers Sir Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; statesmen Sir Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan; writers John Galsworthy, T S Eliot and Ted Hughes; internet founder Tim Berners-Lee, broadcaster Sir David Attenborough and medical reformer Florence Nightingale.

J B Priestley, whose portrait Hockney drew in 1973, turned down a knighthood, as did Hockney, because that honour is a Government recommendation bestowed by the monarchy. The OM has nothing to do with politicians.

Hockney has offered no comment about his reason for accepting the honour. He once told the Telegraph & Argus one should only value friends, not prizes, and that he put prizes in his bottom drawer and forgot about them.

He must have a big bottom drawer, for in the past 50 years he has collected nearly 40 international art prizes, honorary degrees and other acclamations.

The blue and red ribboned medallion that comes with the Order of Merit can be tucked away in a drawer; but the letters OM after Hockney’s name remain forever, along with CH and RA – Royal Academician.

To Hockney, these are testimonials of his skills as a craftsman. He has excelled at drawing, painting, printing, theatre set design, photography and latterly picture production via iPhone and iPad.

He also writes well about his own life, while his history of optics in painting, Secret Knowledge, was an international best-seller.

Priestley was multi-faceted too. His published novels total 26 – 11 more than Dickens – and his published plays 48 – 11 more than Shakespeare (39 others were unpublished).

Like Dickens, Priestley was a prolific journalist, campaigner and, of course, a hugely-popular wartime broadcaster.

He wrote essays, one monumental work of literary criticism, and in 1934, long before Bill Bryson’s humorous observations, published a chronicle of his travels round parts of the country, English Journey.

Hockney and Priestley, both Freeman of the City and honoured by Bradford University, came from socially-conscious, politically-aware, Non-Conformist backgrounds. Hockney described his as “radically working-class”.

Priestley’s father Jonathan was a headmaster who introduced school meals to his Green Lane school and was friends with reformers such as Margaret McMillan. In the year of Priestley’s birth, 1894, the Independent Labour Party was founded in Bradford.

J B Priestley was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. David Hockney’s father Kenneth was a CND campaigner and public speaker who took David on the first Aldermarston march. Throughout his life, Hockney has not been afraid to challenge authority or question what others say and do.

Earlier this month, for example, he criticised artist Damien Hirst for using assistants to work on his installations and other objects. Hockney also has assistants to set things up and fetch and carry; but the pictures he makes himself.

Commenting on this apparent spat between the two Yorkshiremen, one blogger shrewdly observed: “Hockney’s work is about exploring ways of seeing. Hirst’s work has really become about his own celebrity, the phenomenon as art as commodity and deconstructing (playing) the art market.”

Hockney himself is reportedly chuffed that his A Bigger Picture show at the Royal Academy, which opens to the public on Saturday, has sold more tickets than the Van Gogh exhibition.