David Hockney remembers learning about the Bayeux Tapestry at school in Bradford, when he was five or six years old. In 1967, when he was 30 – and had graduated from the Royal College of Art and moved to California – the artist went toNormandy to see the tapestry for the first time. Perhaps this visit was in the back of his mind when, in 2018, he bought a 17th-century cottage in Normandy pretty much on a whim and left the west coast of America after many years.

During the pandemic, Hockney stayed at home in his renovated cottage, adjacent to a river and framed by hills. He drew over 200 images on his iPad in just a few weeks, using the immediacy of the format to capture the changes in weather and light (he doubtless took myriad cigarette breaks, since the artist, now 88, refuses to give up a lifelong habit; he once observed with typically dry humour that ‘Picasso smoked, lived to be 91; Monet smoked, lived to be 86; Renoir smoked, lived to be 78; Van Gogh smoked a pipe, and he died early, but not from smoking’).

David Hockney in his studio

The upcoming Hockney show at Serpentine North will include recent works such as Moon Room and the Sunrise series, created en plein air outside the skylit art studio that once housed a cider press. It will also showcase A Year in Normandie, a 90m-long frieze of the changing seasons, inspired by his beloved Bayeux Tapestry.

‘I had to do it from 220 paintings [completed in lockdown] and add to them to get a whole year,’ he told The New Yorker. ‘It was a bit difficult to join them all together…’ It starts with winter trees, takes in the January snow and continues till the days are longer and the air warmer.

As Hockney points out, it’s ‘a momentous year for the Bayeux Tapestry’. In the autumn of 2026, the 70m tapestry, which depicts the 1066 Norman invasion and Battle of Hastings, will be on show at the British Museum in a historic loan agreement. It will be the first time it’s been in the UK since it was made, almost 1,000 years ago.