Live Auction: 17 October 2025 • 11:30 AM BST • London

He was speaking shortly after he completed an epic work in what was then a very new medium. Early the following year this series of over fifty pictures filled the grandest gallery in the Royal Academy. Hockney entitled this monumental, multiple work, ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven).

This was novel in two ways. Firstly, in the way it was made. Hockney had begun to draw on his iPhone in 2009 and had adopted the larger iPad a month or so after it was introduced by Steve Jobs at the end of January 2010. Subsequently anyone visiting the artist in Bridlington – then his centre of operations – would hear him extol the virtues and possibilities of this device as a tool for drawing.

As he worked with it, Hockney found out more about it. One discovery was that these iPad drawings could be printed out. Effectively, here was a colour print medium like others he had been employing for decades – but more portable and adaptable. An iPad drawing could be enlarged many times without losing impact (indeed often gaining it). And the whole process of drawing could be done outdoors, in front of the motif.

All these considerations came together in Hockney’s mind early in 2011. This year he planned to depict spring, a time of year he had come to feel was especially dramatic and exciting, and to record its development day by day on a country road outside Bridlington called Woldgate.

Hockney’s initial idea had been to paint the season of new growth as it evolved from day to day. But working at an easel en plein air, he reflected, was ‘a bit difficult when you are stood out there in the winter’ (all the more so if, like Hockney, you feel the cold).

After he had made a ‘four or five’ iPad drawings on Woldgate in early January, it struck him that ‘we could do the whole room in this way, the iPad would be very good for it’. Between January and June he did 94 iPads, but he edited them down to 51 – of which the 17 in this collection include many of the finest.

The decision to use this medium affected the way Hockney thought of each image as he made it.

The result was a work in multiple parts that was innovatory in every way (a point which escaped some critics at the time). It is true that spring is a time-honoured subject in European art, often as part of a sequence of four seasons. But no artist had ever observed it so closely, with such fascinated and loving attention, nor had recorded it in detail as an unrolling process.

Hockney had first been struck by the drama and excitement of the Northern European spring in 2002, when he walked through Holland Park each day from his own London studio to Lucian Freud’s, where he was sitting for a portrait. He had spent the previous 20 years in Southern California where seasonal changes are much less marked. In England, Hockney realised, every day of spring is different: leaves and flowers unfurl, vegetation burgeons, the light alters, and hence so does the shade.

At the time, he pointed out, even the shadows on the surface of Woldgate metamorphosed between the ‘lacy’ ones cast by the bare branches and budding foliage on, say, 12 April (Lot 111) and the dark, solid shade under the dense greenery of 2 June (Lot 105). On some days, such as May 17 (Lot 102), Hockney produces virtually a botanical study of wayside flowers and grasses.

At the time, there were those who thought Hockney’s work in the landscape was a nostalgic return to the past. But at a distance of a decade and a half, his Yorkshire (and Norman) landscapes seem profoundly in tune with the times. More and more, we realise that we are part of nature. Contemplating the environment around us is not only a deep pleasure, it is also vital to understanding ourselves. Now it is very clear that the coming of spring truly matters. If it fails, catastrophe follows.

Martin Gayford, October 2025

Sotheby’s is grateful to esteemed author Martin Gayford for his thoughtful contribution to this catalogue.