During the spring of 2021, while the world was still largely shut indoors, David Hockney, in his Normandy home, looked at a table in front of him and discovered his latest source of inspiration, which would eventually yield one of the most joyful bodies of work of his later career. The pandemic had changed little about his routine, since the year before he had used the iPad to chronicle The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020. This time, however, his inspiration turned inward, from the fields outside to the domestic scene before him. 

This series began, as so many of Hockney’s projects did, serendipitously, with something simply existing in front of him. Sitting at the table in his farmhouse, he “caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table” and painted them on his iPad. A few days passed and he sat in the same spot, across from the same ceramic vase, and began another. And so, his routine was born: the same seat, the same table, the same view, with only the flowers and the light changing from each day to the next. 

Soon he reasoned that if he put the flowers in a glass vase, the sunlight permeating through the vessel and catching the water would make for a more interesting subject to paint. He was drawn to the challenge of capturing the refraction and bending of light through water. From that fixed vantage point, the series blossomed, and this single corner of a domestic interior became a subject worth revisiting again and again, each iPad painting offering a fresh look at a corner of the room he already knew by heart. 

The result was twenty still lifes made over the following months, each title dated like a diary entry and each a record of his sustained attention on the same modest subject. With each painting tied to a particular day, the series records unique moods and moments, and when seen together, the pleasure lies in the variation between each one and the last. Some paintings crowd the plane with exuberant blooms, while others are sparse and pared-back.

That variation unfolds across the seasons. The series spans late winter (end of January) to full spring (end of April), and although Hockney kept the setting fixed, with burgundy walls and gingham tablecloth, the flowers changed with the calendar. The flattened, decorative backdrop recalls Matisse, whose still lifes Hockney admired and whose tactics of flattened space and decorative pattern he adopts here. Within that recurring frame, every painting becomes distinct and unique, establishing variety within the constant.

Unafraid to embrace technology, Hockney took up the iPad in 2010, and by 2021 he had mastered it, building up layers with the speed of a sketch and the depth of a painting. Vibrant colours were laid down with the confidence of someone who has spent decades thinking about colour, and the flowers seem to burst with colour.

Technique alone does not explain the energy of these works. Upon confrontation with a still life, Hockney admits to being galvanized by the realisation that “there are a thousand things here I can see”, and such zest and enthusiasm explains why he returned to the same subject, in the same corner of the same room, twenty times. The subject was never exhausted, because looking is never finished, and each work is a different answer to the question he posed himself: which of those thousand things should I choose?

Those answers now come together at auction for the first time. While individual works from Hockney’s flower series have appeared on the market before, this sale offers, for the first time at auction, the complete sequence of twenty still lifes together. Seen apart, each painting is a delight. Seen together, they become something greater: a full season of looking, and the unbroken record of the artist returning to the same table, day after day, to see it anew. 

David Hockney passed earlier this year in June, having mastered mediums spanning canvas and paper to iPad, and this series now reads as part of a late testament to that final chapter. Though it originated in a season and period of both confinement and uncertainty, it contains no trace of gloom or melancholy, perhaps because Hockney believed “you should paint what you love” and each iPad painting in this series is a piece of that conviction. 

The London Sales Presenting Partner is St. Regis Hotels & Resorts.

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