I was talking to David Hockney on the sunny forecourt of the Royal Academy, where the artist’s exhibition David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opens to the public on Saturday. In fact, it wasn’t Hockney at all, though a fellow visitor to Tuesday’s press preview thought it was and walked over to congratulate him on a wonderful show. There was, I suddenly realised, a strong similarity. My interlocutor was wearing round glasses and clutching a paper beaker of Yorkshire Tea supplied with the compliments of its maker whose name was prominently displayed on the container.

“Actually, it’s Alan Bennett,” I said, following up on a conversation I had had an hour earlier with Charles Spencer, the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph. We’d agreed — hardly a great aperçu this — that the two seem almost indistinguishable these days, each the personification of Yorkshire. Curious to think that the one-time enfant terrible of the British art scene — flamboyantly gay, with bleached hair and garish apparel — should, at 74, have become another ‘national treasure’. Only his devotion to smoking recalls the rebel he once was.

Hockney shares with Bennett the unusual (and very valuable) quality of being popular both with highbrow critics and the general public. His vast new show, with more than 150 landscapes, is set to become a massive hit. Royal Academy staff are bracing themselves for a rush predicted to exceed that for 2010’s The Real Van Gogh.

The reason for the exhibition’s popularity is not hard to discern, for there is about the pictures a joyful, life-affirming quality that cannot fail to touch the spirit. In celebrating nature in every glorious colour, they celebrate life in all its forms. Hockney’s response to the landscape communicates to the viewer with electric ease.

His fecundity is amazing. In the introductory remarks in the room that contains a celebratory group of paintings of hawthorn blossom, an explanation for this is given: “The past few years that Hockney has spent recording the landscape near the seaside town of Bridlington have been the most prolific of his long career. So much of this energy is fuelled by his joy in capturing the area’s beauty.”

The sheer size of some of the works is astonishing. The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven) fills the largest room in the gallery and is composed of one 32-canvas picture and a further 51 prints (including the one below) featuring the same short stretch of road.

My favourite work, without doubt, is Winter Timber, 2009, with the felled trees like a golden stream amid purple and blue woodland (see above). It can be glimpsed from far away through the arches between five of the rooms in the gallery. Close up is a remarkable trompe l’oeil effect as the totemic tree in the foreground appears to stand proud of the canvas (or rather canvases, 15 of them). I needed to go as close as I could to see for sure that this was not the case.

The exhibition will be reviewed in The Oxford Times next week by our art writer Theresa Thompson. Don’t wait for her verdict, though, before booking — online at www.royalacademy.org.uk or phone 0844 209 0051.