Study for the Rock Garden (Old Man) is a soulful figure drawing that relates to an important painting by R.B. Kitaj from the eighties. It pictures an elderly man with a thick beard, his head reclined, his eyes casting a glance to the right, and his mouth sagging open. The silhouette of his broad shoulders is loosely indicated. Being decrepit and sagacious, this characterful figure alludes to the type of the Old Testament prophets. It also bears a striking resemblance to the artist Walter Sickert (1860–1942), who wore a bushy beard towards the end of his life in the thirties and forties. It is unclear whether Kitaj derived the appearance of this figure from a reproduction or a life model. The execution is subtle and skilful, with small amounts of ink smudged in different concentrations to create finely graded modelling. The areas of deepest shadow are strikingly reserved for the mouth, brows and eyes.

This drawing relates to Rock Garden (The Nation) . It is one of several studies of individual heads that Kitaj made in preparation, though it was in fact the only one that came to be used in the finished picture. It became more schematic when translated into the painting, with the figure’s beard simplified into forks (redolent of certain figures in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes) and the expression more grave and less ambiguous. For his 1994 Tate retrospective, Kitaj offered this account of Rock Garden (The Nation):

"I was inspired by the large heads which revolutionaries had knocked off sculpture on Notre Dame that I used to see at the Cluny Museum in Paris and I wanted to do some sculpture to populate a nation in my London garden with made-up characters, so I painted this picture to remind me, but I haven’t gotten around to sculpture yet."

As with many of Kitaj’s pictures, Rock Garden (The Nation) touches on both elevated and commonplace reference points. In his First Diasporist Manifesto, details of three heads from the painting are illustrated alongside a discussion of the ‘golden rule’, the concept in moral philosophy of treating others as one would wish to be treated. Kitaj wrote: ‘The expression of kindness may be a very elusive and unusual painting factor, but I believe it belongs to art, and to Diasporist art.’ The qualities of pathos and neglect in these heads seems to have evinced, in Kitaj’s imagining, the very ‘kindness’ he hoped for in wider human affairs. On the other hand, as the title suggests, this motley assemblage of sculptural fragments can be understood as a literal domestic garden. Gardening was one of Kitaj’s many interests, and his Los Angeles assistant Tracy Bartley later recalled him speaking of ‘the time and care he had taken with his garden in London’ at 62 Elm Park Gardens. A larger work, painted around the same time as Rock Garden (The Nation), is entitled simply ‘The Garden’.