The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (single iPad print)

Spring, one day at a time

Woldgate is a country road in the Yorkshire Wolds near Bridlington, the seaside town where David Hockney set up a home and studio in a converted bed and breakfast. In 2011, six years after leaving Los Angeles for the Yorkshire coast, he wanted to record the slow arrival of spring in the open air. It was too cold to stand outside painting for long, so he drew on an iPad instead.

He began on January 1, 2011, and kept returning to spots along the road as the season turned, into early June. 'I realized to show the full arrival of spring, you have to start in the winter and go into the summer a bit,' he said, 'and then you see all the differences and all the rich things that happen to each tree.' Each sheet is titled by the day it records.

The device suited the light. 'The light changes quickly here, so you have to choose how you want to depict it,' Hockney said in the 2012 exhibition catalog. 'I realized how fast I can capture it with the iPad, a lot faster than watercolor. You can choose a new color or a new brush more rapidly. You don't have to wait for anything to dry.' He later called the season 'a wonderful spring.'

How many drawings the series holds depends on the account. One report says Hockney made 94 drawings that season and narrowed them to 51. Another describes the series as 51 images, and a third says 61. Two of the three accounts tie the figure of 51 to the 2012 exhibition.

A painter who never stopped experimenting

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and studied at Bradford College of Art and then the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, where California light and acrylic paint transformed his work. As a boy he spent school-holiday summers in the early 1950s working in the fields of the Yorkshire Wolds, the landscape he returned to paint half a century later.

He was always drawn to new tools: the fax machine, paper pulp, computer programs. From 2009 he made hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes with the Brushes app on the iPhone and iPad, often sending them to friends. The Woldgate drawings took that habit to a monumental scale.

In 2012 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. In 2018 his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction in New York for $90 million, then a record for a living artist at auction. Hockney died at his home in London on June 11, 2026, aged 88.

2011 and the Bigger Picture

The drawings were made in a year of upheaval. The Arab Spring toppled Egypt's Hosni Mubarak on February 11, eight days before the day of the record sheet. On March 11 an earthquake and tsunami devastated eastern Japan. Hockney, meanwhile, was recording trees and tracks along a single country road in East Yorkshire.

The series was made for Hockney's 2012 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which ran from January 21 to April 9, 2012. The show was given over to new landscapes of East Yorkshire painted for the Academy's galleries, and it included the iPad drawings printed on paper alongside oil paintings and multi-screen films shot with 18 cameras.

Printing digital drawings at this size was itself the point. The edition of 25 sheets measures 55 by 41 1/2 inches, and the edition of 10 is printed across four sheets mounted on Dibond, 96 by 72 inches framed.

From £19,000 to £762,000

When the prints first came onto the market, they were not expensive by Hockney standards. One account puts prices at roughly £19,000 in 2014. The record sheet itself, 19 February, impression 15 of 25, was bought from a Los Angeles gallery that year by the collector who would later sell it.

On October 17, 2025, in London, a single collector offered 17 sheets from the series in a dedicated sale, the largest group of Hockney iPad drawings ever offered at once. Together they brought £6.2 million (reported as $8.3 million), more than double the high estimate and far above the presale low estimate of £1.7 million. The auctioneer said 40 percent of the drawings went to American collectors and 65 percent were bought online, and that 15 of the 17 set records for their subjects across both editions.

The Hockney print record fell three times that day. The last and highest was 19 February, which sold for £762,000 (reported as about $1 million) against an estimate of £120,000 to £180,000. The previous record for any Hockney print had been £504,000 (reported as $693,069). The buyer was not named.

Reading a sheet

Every sheet carries the full series title followed by the date it records: 'The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) - 19 February.' Some dates appear more than once, distinguished by 'No. 1' or 'No. 2.' Each date is a different image, so the series is a family of separate prints rather than one.

The record sheet is described as an iPad drawing printed in colors on wove paper, signed in pencil, dated and numbered 15/25, with a sheet size of 139.7 by 105.4 cm (55 by 41 1/2 inches). It was published by the artist. Its larger sibling edition of 10 is printed on four joined sheets, so the two editions are easy to tell apart by format alone.

No catalogue raisonne number has been published for the series in the sources used here.

The numbers

Medium

iPad drawing printed in colors on wove paper

Dimensions

Edition of 25: sheet 139.7 x 105.4 cm (55 x 41 1/2 in.); edition of 10: four sheets on Dibond, 244 x 183 cm (96 x 72 in.) framed

Record impression

19 February, 15/25, signed in pencil, dated and numbered

Publisher

The artist

Catalogue raisonne

None stated in the sources used

Current owner

Private; the 2025 buyer was not named

Timeline

1. Jul 9, 1937

   David Hockney is born in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

2. 1959

   Hockney enters the Royal College of Art, where he studies until 1962.

3. 2009

   Hockney begins drawing with the Brushes app on the iPhone and later the iPad, sending images to friends.

4. Jan 1, 2011

   Hockney begins the Woldgate iPad drawings on New Year's Day.

5. Feb 19, 2011

   The day recorded in the sheet that would set the Hockney print record.

6. Jun 2011

   The series runs into early June.

7. Jan 21, 2012

   David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opens at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, unveiling the series. It runs to April 9.

8. 2012

   Hockney is appointed to the Order of Merit.

9. 2014

   Impression 15/25 of 19 February is bought from a Los Angeles gallery by the collector who later sells it.

10. Nov 2015

    Hockney sells his Bridlington house, ending his long tie to the town.

11. Nov 15, 2018

    Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sells for $90 million at auction in New York.

12. Oct 17, 2025

    Seventeen sheets from the series bring £6.2 million in London; 19 February sets the Hockney print record at £762,000.

13. Jun 11, 2026

    Hockney dies at his home in London, aged 88.

The world in 2011

• Jan 4, 2011

  Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi dies, a spark for the protests that become the Arab Spring.

• Feb 11, 2011

  Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigns after mass protests.

• Mar 11, 2011

  A 9.1-magnitude earthquake and tsunami strike eastern Japan.

• Apr 29, 2011

  An estimated two billion people watch the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

• Sep 17, 2011

  Occupy Wall Street protests begin in New York.

• Oct 20, 2011

  Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is killed in Sirte.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (single iPad print) is number 29 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (29 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Hockney turned to the iPad because standing in the cold to paint en plein air through a Yorkshire winter was too much.
• He started the series on New Year's Day 2011 and kept going until early June.
• The record was broken three times in a single sale on October 17, 2025.
• The record sheet sold for more than four times its high estimate.
• Forty percent of the 17 drawings sold that day went to American collectors, and 65 percent were bought online.
• The large edition of 10 is printed on four separate sheets, 96 by 72 inches framed.