This portrait portrays Leon Kossoff’s brother, Chaim. It belongs to a cycle of work that Kossoff started in 1983 following the death of his father. Paul Moorhouse has written about these portraits from the 1980s, suggesting that ‘[i]n contrast to the congested energy of the early portraits, [they] possess a startling clarity, especially the paintings of Chaim’. Portrait of Chaim No. 2 was painted in 1987, shortly after the first painting in this small series, Portrait of Chaim No. 1 (1987, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Both works follow the same composition, though the outlines of the sitter have been clarified in the second version. Bald and bespectacled, Chaim is pictured wearing a cardigan with a shirt and tie. His shoulders slope from left to right and his head is turned to the right. He looks down at the floor. In Portrait of Chaim No. 2, the sloping of his shoulders is more pronounced and the arm of the chair (cutting across the lower part of his figure in the first portrait) has been removed. In contrast, the lower half of the picture is given over exclusively to Chaim’s tightly clasped hands. The figure has a pensive mood. This is an important work in Kossoff’s mature portraiture – brooding and powerfully executed. The painting’s spontaneity is achieved by Kossoff’s fastidious observation of the sitter. As he said to Richard Wollheim in 2001, '[y]ou're painting a model you're so familiar with that you're struggling, and you're saying, "Can you keep your eyes open?", and she moves, she makes a gesture, and you know you can do something you've never done before. Space is displaced.' Kossoff is acutely sensitive to such nuances of shifting gesture. Though he knows his sitters so well, it is often the unfamiliar in them which prompts him to finish a work.