Hockney's gift to the Tate

Bigger Trees near Warter depicts a typical Yorkshire landscape, west of Bridlington and was painted en plein air.

At 4.6 by 12.2 metres it's David Hockney's largest ever painting. Handily it was painted onto 50 individual panels, making it easier to move and mount, and indeed, to paint.

The scale was a challenge; it was impossible for Hockney to step back and view the whole work.

He began by making drawings and used these to locate where each canvas would fit in the composition. From these a computer-mosaic of the picture was generated enabling him to step back, albeit in a virtual space.

Hockney was then able to take the individual canvas panels to the site and thus create his enormous work over a six-week period.

As Hockney describes: "My picture is adaptable. You can split it in two and show one or both halves, or even a quarter of it. Or show the painting with two full-scale reproductions that would almost make a cloister."

East Yorkshire captured Hockney's imagination as a teenager and he returns intermittently to this part of England when visiting family in the coastal town of Bridlington.

But it is only in the last four years that he has focussed on the landscape, making it the primary source of inspiration for his art.

The painting was first displayed as a show-stopper at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition last year.

It will go on display at Tate Britain in autumn 2009, joining the seven other paintings by Hockney in the Tate Collection. They include The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I) 1962, acquired as early as 1963, the celebrated A Bigger Splash 1967 and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970 -71. The Collection also includes many works of paper.

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