A choice of art books – from Carpaccio to David Hockney

David Hockney once remarked that he wasn’t greedy for money, but was covetous of an interesting life. Then he added that he could find excitement ‘in raindrops falling on a puddle’. There are no puddles in My Window (Taschen, £100), previously only available as a limited edition, but Hockney finds ravishing beauty in such sights as the roofs of neighbouring houses, a street lamp or a distant crane.

This huge and sumptuous volume is a visual diary: it consists of what Hockney saw as he lay in bed and looked out at the world each morning between 2009 and 2011. His view was much like anyone else’s, nor is there anything unusual about the window itself. But there is endless variety in the changing weather and light, and also in how he depicts such mundane objects as a vase of flowers on the sill, curtains and blinds.

The results illustrate two of Hockney’s contentions. Firstly, that it’s not the subject itself that’s interesting, it’s the person doing the looking. The other message is the simple but profound one with which he sometimes signs his emails: ‘Love life.’

The late Lucian Freud accomplished remarkable things with the old-fashioned medium of etching. Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints (Modern Art Press, £125) by Toby Treves is an impeccably scholarly, definitive study of his work as a maker of prints. Hockney points out that each graphic medium has distinctive possibilities, and also limitations. An etching needle, for example, makes thin, delicate lines. But Freud set himself a challenge: to make his etchings a parallel to his evolving paintings. As a sitter for works in each medium, I noted that he devoted equal (and equally enormous) quantities of time to both.