The Watercolor That Just Sold for $1.39 Million

When David Hockney traveled through southern Spain in 2004, he carried with him not only sketchbooks and brushes but a renewed sense of purpose. Watercolor had captured his imagination again after decades of experimenting with photography, multi-canvas compositions, and digital tools. Courtyard, Palace of Carlos V. Alhambra, Granada, painted during that journey, stands as one of the most ambitious watercolors of his career: a sweeping, two-sheet panorama that distills the light, geometry, and layered histories of the Alhambra into a single, luminous image.

Fresh to the market and recently sold for $1.39 million, the painting exemplifies Hockney’s belief that watercolor can do what no mediated vision can: place the viewer in the moment, inside the experience of looking. “I used watercolor because I wanted a flow from my hand,” he has said, citing the influence of Chinese artists who insist that painting requires “the hand, the eye, and the heart.” That combination — philosophical, physical, and emotional — energized his return to the medium in the early 2000s.

By the time he arrived in Granada, Hockney was deep into a personal and artistic recalibration. His photographic “joiners” of the 1980s had already challenged conventional perspective, and his book Secret Knowledge (2001) examined how optical devices shaped Western art. But in Spain, he chose to set aside cameras and return to plein air drawing. The architecture of Andalusia — with its tiled surfaces, repeating arches, and open courtyards — offered a perfect testing ground for the ideas about perception that had preoccupied him for decades.

In Courtyard, Palace of Carlos V. Alhambra, Granada, Hockney interprets the Renaissance colonnade with crisp washes of ochre, ultramarine, and earth tones that seem to radiate from the courtyard’s center. The circular space bends gently outward, as if the architecture itself were breathing. Shadows extend like spokes on a wheel; the sky becomes an oval echo of the arena below. Rather than delivering an exact architectural record, Hockney gives us perception in motion — how the eye travels, pauses, and reorients as it takes in space.

The composition also places Hockney in dialogue with other artists who found metaphor in circular arenas. Picasso, fascinated by the bullring, saw it as a stage for ritual and performance. Francis Bacon turned it into a psychological crucible. Hockney’s version, by contrast, is serene — an arena emptied of conflict, filled instead with the quiet drama of looking.

His time in Spain produced a series of major watercolors, including Andalucia. Fountains, Cordova (2004), which sold earlier this year for $2.3 million. Collectors have increasingly recognized the significance of this period: in 2023, View from Terrace III (2003) set a record for a Hockney watercolor at $7.2 million. While still modest compared to his $90.3 million auction record, these sales underscore the growing appreciation for Hockney’s restless engagement with materials.

For watercolorists, Courtyard, Palace of Carlos V. Alhambra, Granada offers more than market value — it offers a reminder of what the medium does best. With a few bold washes and decisive lines, Hockney turns a centuries-old courtyard into a contemporary meditation on space, time, and the pure pleasure of looking.