Shown for the first time in London, the 90-metre frieze “A Year in Normandie”, chronicling the lockdown spring of 2020 to winter 2021 in the garden and landscape around his Pays d’Auge home, is the masterwork of Hockney’s old age. In crystalline clarity, lucid structure, ambitious scale and delicious varied mark-making, it shares the strengths of his seductive, stylised early paintings. It is also consciously late work: about time passing, the cycle of nature, interiority, how reality becomes more of an abstraction as we grow older. People are absent, though Hockney’s red-roofed house, garden chairs and the treehouse are human stand-ins; gleaming hay bales and piles of winter logs speak of cultivation.