A new blossoming: David Hockney paints Normandy

In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more than 40 years. He liked its great panoramic length and the absence of shadows. But while there he found himself seduced by the scenery of Normandy, its winding lanes and orchards of blossom trees. He decided he would like to paint the arrival of spring there, as he had in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, a decade earlier.

He asked his long-standing assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, known as J-P, to look into the possibility of renting a house. He was so delighted with the first one J-P showed him, La Grande Cour, that he exclaimed: ‘Let’s buy it!’ It was a rambling farmhouse, all higgledly-piggledy, with many wooden beams and no straight lines — ‘even the corners have no straight lines!’—set in four acres of fields and orchards. His one fear was that the house might be cold, but J-P assured him that he would make it warm.