Head is a glutinous, icon-like painting from the early maturity of Leon Kossoff’s career. The relationship between figure and ground is tightly controlled, with the model’s head expanded to the edges of the board. The fleshy, masticated surface of the paint is dependent on the artist’s choice of Stokes paint, a highly workable industrial paint with a high content of linseed oil. Kossoff’s practice of working and reworking his paintings was enabled by the plasticity of this medium. Andrea Rose has suggested that the sitter in this painting was Kossoff’s wife Rosalind (known to family as Peggy). ‘The sitter is unidentified, but it is possibly the artist's wife, Rosalind, and was painted around 1968, when she began sitting for a sequence of 'Nude on Red Bed' paintings. Her hair is piled up on her head – a style she wore at the time.’ The beehive hairstyle in the painting gives the work a feeling distinctive to this period of the 1960s.