David Hockney’s Between Kilham and Langtoft and Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010 — ‘a kind of prayer of thanks to nature and the life force’

In the mid-1990s, David Hockney was living in Los Angeles when he learned that his friend, the entrepreneur Jonathan Silver, was dying of cancer. When the artist returned to Saltaire, near Bradford, to see him, Silver suggested it was time Hockney painted his native Yorkshire. ‘You’ve neglected it for so long,’ he said. The artist agreed and, on turning 60, swapped Beverly Hills for Bridlington, to consider how to remake the verdant landscape of his childhood anew.

At the time, Hockney was famed for his depictions of southern California. He painted suntanned bodies by china-blue swimming pools in the dazzling Los Angeles light. Everything was carefully composed, sexy, and meticulously delineated. Now Hockney’s painterly palette expanded to capture the spectrum of subtle shifts in light which bathe the English countryside, breaking through dense, ancient woodlands and illuminating the patchwork of rolling fields coloured a rich green by steady rainfall. Returning to England, Hockney saw with fresh eyes the quiet yet dramatic beauty of Yorkshire.

Driving across the Wolds, recalling bike rides with his brother John, Hockney was struck by the living aspect of the landscape. ‘Some days were just glorious,’ he said. ‘The colour was fantastic.’ He realised that the countryside was bursting with life. East Yorkshire has been prime agricultural land for centuries, and as such remains relatively unspoilt and unpopulated. Hockney decided to make a visual record of this little-known part of England, just as Van Gogh had done more than a century earlier in Provence.

Hockney was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937 and studied drawing and painting at college in his home city. In 1959, he attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he discovered Matisse and Picasso; he was attracted to the Fauvist because of his commitment to colour, and to the Cubist for his manipulation of perspective. In the mid-1960s, the artist left the UK for Hollywood, where he resolved to become the Piranesi of Santa Monica. For the next three decades, Hockney celebrated the hedonism of southern California in paintings washed in rich colour and defined by sharp angles.

When the artist returned to his home territory in Yorkshire, the paintings that emerged over the following decade were vast and revelatory. They celebrated the stubborn renewal of flora through the seasons, from the creamy explosion of hawthorn blossom in spring to the rich green hedgerows of summer. The results are a kind of visual diary, a record of the rhythms of nature throughout the year.

Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 5 March 2025 are two monumental works: the 2006 painting Between Kilham and Langtoft and the nine-screen video installation Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010. The first, painted en plein air, depicts fields in East Yorkshire, a place Hockney knew as a boy in the 1950s, when he spent the school holidays stooking corn.

In 2009, Between Kilham and Langtoft was included in Hockney’s first museum presentation of Yorkshire landscapes, at the Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall, in Germany. When the paintings went on show at the Royal Academy in London in 2012, more than half a million people went to see them. It was one of the most popular shows in the academy’s history.

Hockney’s study of landscape aligns him with two British artists he greatly admires, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, both of whom found rich artistic inspiration in their native soil. A major exhibition of Constable’s large-scale landscapes (known as the ‘six footers’) was staged at Tate Britain in London while Hockney was painting Between Kilham and Langtoft, which is itself six feet wide, made by joining two canvases together.

Hockney has a cinematographer’s eye for the land’s contours. It seems to ebb and flow, coming in and out of focus, blurring the boundaries between reality and memory. As the artist explained: ‘I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory.’

Hockney also finds inspiration in the French Impressionist Claude Monet. Between Kilham and Langtoft, like Monet’s late paintings of his garden at Giverny, has an emotional impact achieved by amplifying the landscape and shifting the perspective. The result is almost surreal, with the herringbone tractor tracks meandering into the yellow corn, and the green hedgerows morphing into a verdant jungle.

In 2010, a few years after painting Between Kilham and Langtoft, Hockney expanded his investigation of the Yorkshire landscape into dramatic new media. He and his assistants fitted out an SUV with nine digital video cameras, all angled slightly differently to capture multiple perspectives of Woldgate Woods. The result, when played back on a bank of television monitors, was described by the art historian Tim Barringer as looking like ‘a hi-def post-Cubist movie’.

The artist sees this technique as just another form of drawing, likening his approach to the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their spirit of scientific inquiry. Hockney’s real subject, of course, is the nature of time; and, just as a scientist would observe and faithfully record his findings, Hockney uses this technique to tell an important story about the evolution of the Earth.

Hockney’s biographer, Marco Livingstone, writes that his Yorkshire landscapes are ‘a kind of prayer of thanks to nature and the life force’. He considers them to be Hockney’s love letter to his native land, where ‘his roots are as deep and firm as those trees on which he has expended such affectionate and respectful attention’.

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal on 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online until 20 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales