David Hockney, Britain’s most celebrated contemporary painter, has downed his paint-brush temporarily to curate the Tate’s largest survey of watercolour masterpieces by J. M. W. Turner.

Having completed a series of massive landscapes of East Yorkshire, which are reproduced in The Timestoday before their unveiling in June, Hockney is now paying tribute to his 19th-century predecessor with an exhibition at Tate Britain.

He has selected 165 watercolours from the Tate’s Turner Bequest, about 30,000 works on paper that were left to the nation by the artist and which, for conservation reasons, cannot be put on display permanently.

Hockney said: “Turner is one of the masters of watercolour. I am thrilled to be working with the Tate on this major exhibition and to study in depth their extraordinary collection . . . This is one of the most challenging mediums for an artist to work with.”

The show opens three years after Hockney began experimenting with watercolours, reviving a great English artistic tradition that he had previously dismissed as a “wishy-washy” medium associated with Sunday painters and amateur groups.

Hockney’s Turner exhibition will illustrate the development of virtuoso techniques used by one of the greatest painters Britain has produced.

Highlights include beautiful studies of the Thames, made on the spot in his sketchbooks, and watercolours from his travels in Italy, such as St Peter’s from the Villa Barberini and Lake Geneva from the Dent d’Oche above Lausanne.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said that the exhibition will reveal Turner’s unrivalled mastery of watercolour painting, with the insights of a contemporary artist who is also an exceptional watercolourist.

Hockney on Turner Watercolours, which will be at Tate Britain from June 11 until February 3, 2008, will coincide with an exhibition of five massive new paintings in David Hockney: The East Yorkshire Landscape, marking the artist’s 70th birthday in July.

Hockney, a painter, print-maker, photographer and stage designer, is the Bradford boy who arrived wide-eyed in Los Angeles and took the American dream of pools and sunshine back to Britain. Swimming pools, and the sunlight of southern California, became a central image in his art. He is best-known for works such as A Bigger Splash, his 1967 image of a splash made by an unseen diver.

In his latest paintings he rediscovers the English landscape of his youth. He likens the space and light of East Yorkshire to “the sorts of wide vistas you get all the time in the American West”.

They each show Woldgate Woods, a grove of trees in East Yorkshire, painted outdoors during the past year, capturing the way light dances through the branches. Each one has been divided into six 3ft x 4ft (0.9m x 1.2m) panels.

Critics who have had a sneak preview describe them as ravishing works that depict East Yorkshire landscapes as if they were interiors — intimate spaces that Hockney invites the viewer to enter.

Mr Deuchar said: “Hockney conveys the land and light in electric colour, bringing to the canvases his love of place, freshly observed and infused by decades of experience and the memories that it conjures of childhood days.”

The big picture

— Hockney’s iconic swimming pool painting, The Splash, sold at Sotheby’s in London last year for a record £2.92 million

— His 1988 retrospective exhibition for the Tate attracted more than 170,000 visitors

— Born in Bradford, his first American solo exhibition was in New York, where he received rave reviews

Source: Times database

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