The Yosemite Suite vs The Arrival Of Spring: The Scarcity Gap In Hockney's Digital Market

In 2010, the year the first iPad was released, Hockney took the device to Yosemite National Park and drew 24 views of the valley using the Brushes app, later issued as The Yosemite Suite in editions of 25. The following year he returned to Woldgate in East Yorkshire and produced The Arrival Of Spring: 49 prints in an edition of 25 and a group of 12 at larger scale in an edition of 10.

Same hand, same medium, same moment in Hockney's digital experiment. The Royal Academy showed work from both bodies in A Bigger Picture in 2012. For a decade afterwards, neither series had much of a secondary market to speak of, The Arrival Of Spring did not appear at auction until 2017, and traded at an average hammer price of £29,000 that year.

From there, the two series went separate ways.

The Arrival Of Spring comprises over 60 print titles and roughly 1,345 impressions in circulation. The standard Yosemite Suite runs to over 24 titles and roughly 600 impressions, less than half the physical supply.

The liquidity gap runs the other way. The Arrival Of Spring has made approximately 127 auction appearances; The Yosemite Suite has made 36. Annualised, the difference is starker: 38 Arrival Of Spring works traded in 2025 alone, the series' highest volume to date, while Yosemite works continue to surface a handful at a time. Several titles have not been seen publicly for five years or more, The Yosemite Suite 12, for instance, last appeared at auction in September 2020.

Price tells the rest. The Arrival Of Spring averaged £252,400 at hammer across 2025, its highest level to date. The Yosemite Suite's 2025 average was £83,000. The growth rates compound the difference: based on average annual hammer prices, The Arrival Of Spring has grown at approximately 31.1% annually since 2017, compared with 19.7% for The Yosemite Suite.

David Hockney Digital Series: Average Hammer Price, The Yosemite Suite vs The Arrival Of Spring (2017 – Q1 2026)

Put plainly: a Woldgate lane and a Yosemite pine, drawn a year apart on the same screen and issued in comparable edition structures, are now separated by a factor of three at auction. On an aggregate basis the gap is wider still: the edition of 25 component of The Arrival Of Spring alone represents a significantly larger body of value than the standard Yosemite Suite, despite the latter having less than half the physical supply.

It is tempting to read The Arrival Of Spring's performance as scarcity finding its level. The record shows something more specific. Before 2022, the series had no established pricing framework; what changed was not the supply of works but the arrival of supply at market.

The decisive events were two single-owner sales at Sotheby's. The first, in October 2025, brought 17 works to market in a concentrated moment: a white-glove result, £6.2 million at hammer, with all but one lot exceeding its high estimate. The second instalment, in March 2026, added 16 works from the same collection and finished 136% above its low estimate, with 13 resale works setting new records.

Critically, the new levels have held outside the single-owner context. In the first half of 2026, works have cleared £302,500 at Sotheby’s Riyadh and £295,680 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong (both with fees), £220,000 (hammer) at Seoul Auction and £150,000 at Christie’s Paris; multiple geographies, multiple sale formats, consistent results. Recent resale examples from 2025 and 2026 have generated returns of between 328% and 611%, demonstrating how significantly values have shifted since the series first began trading on the secondary market.

The repricing also dismantled the series' internal hierarchy. The edition of 10, historically the premium format, peaked at an average of £366,300 in 2022 and now sits at £290,400 (2025). The edition of 25 has moved from £41,100 in 2018 to £249,100 in 2025, narrowing the gap between the formats from roughly 2x to less than 1.2x. Collector appetite, not edition size, set the price.

The lesson is uncomfortable for a simple scarcity narrative: a significant increase in supply did not dilute The Arrival Of Spring. Instead, it helped establish the benchmark structure the series had lacked for a decade.

Set against that, the Yosemite record is thin. The most recent hammer results for the standard suite: The Yosemite Suite 1 at £83,000 at Christie's New York in April 2025; The Yosemite Suite 15 at £42,000 at SBI Art Auction in October 2024; The Yosemite Suite 17 at £35,000 at Christie's London in March 2024; The Yosemite Suite 21 at £40,000 at Phillips London in September 2023. Steady, broadly consistent results, but four data points in two years, where The Arrival Of Spring produced 37 in one.

At the top of the series, the absence is more pronounced. The large-format Yosemite works from 2011 have appeared only rarely - Yosemite II, October 16th 2011 reached £249,000 at hammer at Sotheby's New York in March 2023 - and three of the five key Bigger Yosemite works have never come to auction at all. This is a segment defined as much by absence as by transaction.

Supply And Liquidity: Impressions In Circulation vs Auction Appearances, By Series

The result is a series that leads Hockney's digital market on average value and trails it on evidence. Current valuations rest on series-level logic rather than work-by-work benchmarks, because the work-by-work benchmarks largely do not exist. That is not a weakness in the pricing; it is a description of the market's actual state.

The honest answer is that the data cannot say, but it can say what catching up would require, because The Arrival Of Spring has just demonstrated the mechanism.

Scarcity alone does not reprice a market; transactions do. The Yosemite Suite already has the scarcity, the medium, and the moment. What it has never had is a supply event, a concentrated moment of availability that forces price discovery across the series rather than one work at a time. Until that happens, the series will continue to do what it has done for a decade: trade infrequently, hold its value, and resist benchmarking.

What has changed is the context around it. Demand for Hockney's digital output is extending series by series, Digital Drawings generated around £1 million at auction in 2025, Moving Focus approximately £1.3 million – the collector interest that first coalesced around The Arrival Of Spring is now spreading across Hockney’s wider digital market. The Yosemite Suite sits where that attention meets genuinely untested supply. Whether the gap closes through a single estate or collection coming to market, or through gradual title-by-title discovery, on current evidence, nothing in the demand picture argues for it widening.

For holders of Yosemite works, the position is unusual. The series has the strongest attention environment it has ever had, and almost no recent public results to anchor against, which tends to favour private placement over auction, where a work can be positioned against the full market context rather than a five-year-old comparable. Current estimates place standard suite works broadly between £45,000 and £160,000 depending on composition and condition, with the large-format 2011 works in a different premium-bracket entirely. Where a work has not traded publicly for years, a specialist valuation does the work the auction record cannot.

For buyers, the comparison with The Arrival Of Spring frames the opportunity without settling it. Yosemite offers exposure to the same artist, medium and period at a fraction of the established series' levels, ahead of whatever price discovery its supply eventually forces. That is an argument for attention and research at the individual title level, not a guarantee of repricing, and the series' own history counsels patience. It has moved steadily for a decade, and markets this thin reward research over speed.

The full series-by-series data and the structural read on where Hockney's market moves next are set out in the Hockney Market Report 2026. For valuations or sale strategy on works from either series, speak to a specialist.

*Data drawn from MyArtBroker's proprietary database, tracking auction and private sale records across more than 400 global auction houses. Figures reflect public auction results at hammer unless stated otherwise. Impression counts are based on published edition sizes and exclude proofs.