For most of his life, David Hockney has been an urban creature. Bradford and London have been his main bases, leavened by the surreal suburbia of the Hollywood Hills and the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. At the very beginning of 2019, however, he bought a house a long way from other people, deep in rural Normandy.
He had been to Honfleur and seen a sunset, and then visited the Bayeux Tapestry. The food and the smoking culture appealed to him, and he liked the idea of spending more time in the area. He was going to rent a place but saw one house, almost on a whim, and bought it. La Grande Cour is a relatively modest half-timbered farmhouse – “a Seven Dwarfs house”, as he calls it – that came with four acres, a stream, an outbuilding for a studio and a treehouse. Hockney has been there ever since, smoking, eating tripes à la mode de Caen, and drawing.
Content from our partners
