David Hockney to design stained glass window for Westminster Abbey

David Hockney will design a six metre-high stained glass window for Westminster Abbey to celebrate the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The artist was invited by the abbey to design the window, which is one of the church’s few remaining clear windows, in the north transept of the church. It will be known as The Queen’s Window.

“I have planned a landscape full of blossom that’s a celebration every year,” Hockney says of the project. It will be made by Barley Studio, a fabrication studio in York that specialises in stained glass.

The Dean of Westminster said in a statement: “It will be wonderful to have in the Abbey the work of this internationally renowned contemporary British artist who has been honoured by The Queen with membership of the Order of Merit, which is in Her Majesty’s personal gift.”

Hockney famously rejected a knighthood in 1990, and turned down an invitation to paint the Queen in 2011, telling the BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme that she “would make a ‘terrific subject’ but he prefers to paint people he knows”. This will be his first stained glass window.