Leon Kossoff was a life-long admirer of ‘the old masters’, a passion that began with his first visit to the National Gallery as a nine-year-old boy. He was at first captivated by Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream, and a particular interest in Rubens, Poussin and Goya followed. He explained that ‘my attitude to these works has always been [...] to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.’ In a long-standing agreement, Kossoff often visited the National Gallery before opening hours to spend time drawing. For him, drawing was both a form of investigation and education. He considered himself a student of his artistic predecessors, and intentionally attempted to ‘teach [himself] to draw’, even when he was an accomplished artist well into his seventies. He once wrote that everything he did was a form of drawing.

On a rare trip abroad in the 1970s, Kossoff encountered the work of Goya at the Prado Museum. He later spoke of the ‘immediate, intimate’ rapport he felt with the Spanish painter. In 1994, an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Goya: Truth and Fantasy: The Small Paintings, had a profound effect on Kossoff, which perhaps stemmed from the desire of both artists for their practice to open up areas of the self that remained unknown. The freedom and energy with which Kossoff draws is particularly pronounced in his studies from Goya completed in the 1990s, most of which were made during visits to the Small Paintings exhibition.

This charcoal and pastel, drawn from Goya’s Auto de Fe de la Inquisión and depicting the act of public penance, demonstrates Kossoff’s fascination with the relationship between line, mass and space. As with Goya’s painting, the penitential figures in the foreground are illuminated against the darker background of an indistinguishable crowd in a cavernous Gothic church. These figures are identifiable by their bowed heads and conical caps known as ‘coroza’.

Notwithstanding their compositional similarities, Kossoff’s work is readily distinguishable from Goya’s. Kossoff’s manipulation of light and shade is more subtle, and the suffering of the penitents in his drawing is evident not through pained, sorrowful facial expressions, as with Goya, but with tone and colour – the use of red accent lines is reserved only for the blood of the heretics, which add an almost violent flourish to an already sombre scene. In general, Kossoff’s drawing captures the darkness of Goya’s painting in a more abstracted, energetic manner. This energy clearly distinguishes Kossoff’s work from Goya’s – if Goya's painting is one of precision and narrative, clearly depicting the details of the penitential scene, then Kossoff’s is one of immediacy and feeling, foregoing specifics in favour of a mass of figures that convey the intensity of the event.

Kossoff worked primarily from Goya’s later paintings, which often depicted supernatural or religious scenes. Following a serious illness in 1792, Goya was left permanently deaf and his work became heavily focused on dark and violent themes – a reflection of his increasingly pessimistic outlook. Auto de Fe is one of four panel paintings now belonging to the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid that were of particular interest to Kossoff, and from which he drew repeatedly; the other three were A Procession of Flagellants, Bullfight, and the Madhouse.