A masterpiece that calls to mind Henri Matisse, but in a distinct Yorkshire accent

Standing 8.3m tall and 3.5m wide in the North Transept, The Queen’s Window, as David Hockney’s new work is to be called, has been positioned to be clearly visible from Her Majesty’s customary seat facing Westminster Abbey’s Great Pulpit.

Having turned his hand to just about every visual medium at his disposal over his almost 70-year career, it’s hardly surprising that Britain’s greatest artist should finally have come to one of the oldest and most hallowed forms of what is now known as “public art”. The list of modern artists who have designed stained-glass windows is a distinguished one: Marc Chagall, Raoul Dufy, John Piper and many others including, of course, Matisse.

It’s the kind of commission that tends to come late in life, a sort of crowning of the career. This, however, isn’t the work of an artist who is planning to go quietly any time soon.

Hockney’s broad areas of luminous colour leap out against the sombre yellowish grey of the surrounding pillars and arches. His abstracted landscape, based on drawings made in his beloved East Yorkshire, uses the

hawthorn, whose brilliant white blossoms Hockney has depicted in many recent paintings as a symbol of growth and renewal, representing the longevity of the Queen’s life and reign.

The flowers stand out against deep greens, yellow branches of bare trees reaching into the composition like long, dappled fingers. If the hawthorn is a winter flower, it’s glimpsed here in what feels like the brilliant, crisp sunlight that we see early in the year.

The sky is the deepest ultramarine, while the hot red of the path snaking up through the centre of the window feels positively tropical. If you were to be told this was Tahiti rather than the Wolds, I doubt you’d argue.

That South Sea Island reference brings to mind Henri Matisse, who (following in Paul Gauguin’s footsteps) went there in 1930 and whose influence, as Hockney would be the first to acknowledge, is apparent here.

Like Matisse, Hockney didn’t paint his colours on to compositions of clear glass, as is the case with many of the abbey’s older windows. He constructed it from specially made panes of already coloured glass. That means his colours don’t sit on the surface but run all the way through the glass in zinging depth, making the neighbouring 19th-century window, with its black lines around every tiny pane, look positively grey.

The fact that Hockney produced his design from a drawing made on an ipad might seem incongruous, but it is all of a piece with his exploratory approach to materials and the nature of stained glass itself.

Both stained glass and the digital screen are animated by light, and are both products of information ages, if very different ones.

The cathedral, the abbey and the church were the places where the unlettered of the Middle Ages were given messages and told stories, through sculpture, painting and, not least, stained glass. Hockney has renewed that tradition for a sophisticated modern audience, bringing together medieval craft skills and 21st-century technology in an exuberant shout of colour.

‘It’s the kind of commission that tends to come late in life, a sort of crowning of the career’