As Hockney continues to recover in health, he invites close friends and relatives to sit for him in his Bridlington bedroom. In this focused period of drawing with charcoal on paper, he creates touchingly detailed portraits of those near to him.

In late January he ventures out to draw the landscape. After he has made several pictures, he decides that he will stay in England to chronicle The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen). In May he finishes the 25-part work, remarkable for the use of charcoal alone to capture the changing seasons.

That summer, back in the Hollywood Hills, Hockney returns to a colorful palette and begins painting portraits of friends sitting in the same chair in front of a blue background—its hue recalls his first acrylic paintings in California in the 1960s. The first pays tribute to Vincent van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (“At Eternity’s Gate”) (1890), with Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima posing as that painting’s lone figure, who sits holding his head in his hands. [NESTED]After Hockney has painted three or four portraits, he decides to do an extended series. 

An enormous solo show opens at the de Young in San Francisco in October. It is hugely popular with visitors and a critical success. Roberta Smith writes in the New York Times: “At 76, David Hockney is in one of his primes, and apparently he knows it. Not for nothing is his exuberant, immersive survey at the de Young Museum here cheekily titled David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition. This sprawling romp through more than 300 works in several mediums and technologies fills 10 often large galleries and yet primarily covers work from the last decade of Mr. Hockney’s 60-year career. It is dominated by radiant landscapes—some the size of murals—of the fields and woods in different seasons of East Yorkshire .... With an emphasis on bucolic farmland that seems very British, they nonetheless convey the grandeur of nature, still the mother of us all, and of all art. And they also confirm Mr. Hockney’s theory that representational painting can tell you more about reality and perception than either photography or the human eye, which is one reason it can still thrill.”