In 1985, Kossoff came across Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (fig. 15). A desire to paint the church came ‘from reading the first few chapters of [the novel], which reminded me of my own childhood in Spitalfields. I must have passed the church five or six times a week; it did have a strange, terrifying feel about it, yet at the same time it was marvellous.’ The result was one of Kossoff’s most compelling and imaginative series of cityscape paintings. David Sylvester, a friend of Kossoff’s, has described what was at stake for the artist in his paintings of Spitalfields church. ‘For Kossoff, it means the assimilation of a hostile culture that was the norm in the place where he grew up, the culture whose normality made him an outsider.’ Christ Church evidently holds a place of special importance in Kossoff’s work, providing a rare insight into his cultural identity – a topic that is rarely discussed and seldom admitted in his other works. This work was exhibited in 1995 when Kossoff represented Britain at the Venice Biennale – a conclusive testament to the artist’s place in British artistic culture. A total of ten Christ Church paintings were exhibited, alongside other works of London including King’s Cross and Embankment Station. Princess Diana visited the Biennale exhibition and, in relation to the Christ Church paintings, contemporary press coverage noted that she “expressed especial admiration for these works”. “Having been swept through the room of female nudes by her chaperones, the princess dwelt over the paintings of the church”. Kossoff is not the only artist after the Second World War to pay an interest in Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches. In 1945, forty years before Kossoff first engaged with Christ Church, L.S. Lowry painted St Luke’s, Old Street (1945, private collection). Like Kossoff, Lowry emphasised the vertiginous aspect of Hawksmoor’s Gothick style. The obelisk surmounted on the church tower fills the upper register of the painting. Likewise in 1964, John Piper depicted Christ Church and St Anne’s, Limehouse in a series of lithographs entitled A Retrospect of Churches.