David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire sparked a late creative reawakening

At the Fondation Louis Vuitton in early April last year, the exhibition David Hockney 25—curated with his close involvement—moved visitors from the glare of his celebrated early pool paintings to the softer light of 21st-century Yorkshire fields. The show insisted his later pictures of straw bales, hedgerows and ponds were as vital as his famous Californian canvases, and the contrast made the trajectory of his work feel suddenly coherent.

The writer recalls a dinner in west London after a private visit to the National Gallery, attended only by Hockney and the painter Leon Kossoff’s family, where conversation ranged from Secret Knowledge to Hockney’s reading of Caravaggio through camera obscura clues.

Earlier memories of encountering A Bigger Splash in a childhood encyclopedia and the glam century of Hockney’s social world mingle with quieter domestic moments—lychees for dessert and vivid discussions about perspective.

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