Fidelma in a Red Chair is one of Leon Kossoff’s largest figure paintings of the nineteen-seventies and -eighties. The work was executed in a period of burgeoning self-confidence during which the artist developed a personally distinctive mode of painting the human body. The nude subject was a hallmark of ‘School of London’ painting and Fidelma in a Red Chair epitomises the energetic execution and psychological intensity which earned Kossoff a place as one of the pre-eminent painters of his generation, alongside his friend Frank Auerbach and his acquaintances Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The leading specialist on Kossoff’s work, Andrea Rose, estimates that Fidelma Kavanagh ‘sat for Kossoff longer than any of his other professional models.’ She was one of the definitive sitters of the artist’s career, and she helped him to crystallise the painterly idioms and complex emotions that distinguish his work. Fidelma in a Red Chair is among the largest and most important paintings to depict Kavanagh.

Fidelma in a Red Chair was painted at a moment of growing confidence in Kossoff’s career. History and popular opinion have tended to vindicate the representational, figurative approach shared by Kossoff and others associated with a ‘School of London’. It is often forgotten that these artists laboured in partial obscurity up until the later seventies. The phrase ‘a School of London’ was coined by R.B. Kitaj in the essay he wrote to accompany an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, The Human Clay, which he also selected. Kitaj’s exhibition included Kossoff, Freud and Auerbach and demonstrated the vitality of figure painting in London at the time. Owing to the influence of American abstract painting, however, it was not until the middle years of their careers that these artists began to win recognition. Fidelma in a Red Chair was painted at precisely the moment at which Kossoff and his peers were beginning to be understood and respected. The confidence and fluency of the painting should be understood against this background of changing critical fortunes.

Throughout his career, Kossoff painted sitters from life in the confines of his home studio. As with all other such paintings made after 1966, Fidelma in a Red Chair was executed in Chatsworth Road, Willesden Green, where Kossoff lived. The intimacy of this arrangement was a significant aspect of his practice, helping to charge his figure paintings with immediacy and tension. The figure in this work is awkwardly seated, with one leg raised onto the chair and crooked at the knee. A subtle compositional rhythm is achieved by the chance configuration of limbs. Both Kavanagh’s left elbow and left knee are crooked, while the right arm and right leg are outstretched in contrast. The figure dominates the picture, a massive presence barely contained by the parameters of the support. By overburdening the painted space around the figure, Kossoff eschewed conventions of pictorial composition and hinted to the physical enclosure of his studio.

As Fidelma Kavanagh has herself described, she began modelling in the nude while studying at art school in London and Limerick before being introduced to Kossoff by her friend Pauline Rignall. Together Kavanagh and Rignall were two of the artist’s most important female models of his mature period in the late seventies and eighties. Kavanagh went on modelling for Kossoff over a forty-year period and was one of his most constant sitters.

Kossoff completed his first paintings of Kavanagh in 1978. When she started sitting for him, Kavanagh has recalled the ‘torture’ of ‘lying on that red bed in the first couple of weeks’. ‘Fortunately Leon suggested the chair and things were grand from then on.’ Kossoff went on to paint a cycle of paintings in 1981 that depict Kavanagh seated in the eponymous red chair. Most of these works are on a small scale and measure less than twenty-two inches along one side. These paintings use an idiom that Kossoff developed in the early seventies, prompted by his Children’s Swimming Pool series. The dominant features of the idiom are strongly in evidence in Fidelma in a Red Chair: the contours of the figure are clearly defined in bold, singular strokes of the brush; the sitter’s mood is ambiguous, the gestures and facial expression evoking a complex mixture of anguish and boredom; and the flesh tones are a subtle compound, grey tempered with pink, developed from Kossoff’s earlier clay-like idiom of earth colours. Although Fidelma in a Red Chair is closely comparable to Kossoff’s other paintings of Kavanagh—ranging from the earliest works of 1978 to the melancholic, red-hued paintings of 1986—it is notably larger than other works of the same sitter.

The size of the painting is significant. Considerable ambition and sustained concentration were needed for the artist to realise his intimate, first-person experience of the model on such a monumental scale. Kossoff regarded this kind of translation of his personal experience as prerequisite to completing a work. He explained his concept of finish on several occasions. As he wrote in 1974, ‘I have never finished a picture without first experiencing a huge emptying of all factual and topographical knowledge.’ In 1996, he wrote to the art critic John Berger that a sense of the subject’s ‘thereness’ was required, and the same year he told the curator Paul Moorhouse that before finishing he experienced an instant ‘when time seems to collapse’. To translate this evanescent moment into a painting on the scale of Fidelma in a Red Chair demanded a significant mental act.

By repeatedly painting the same sitters and places, Kossoff developed a powerful intuition about the nature of his subject. For each picture, he would systematically produce a complete painting during each sitting with a model. (He generally worked on figure paintings in the presence of a sitter.) If the result did not satisfy his exacting sense of finish, it would be scraped away and the same composition attempted again at the next sitting. This ritual continued indefinitely on the same support until the requisite intensity was achieved, often quite unexpectedly, with the form of the subject locked into each brushstroke. A single picture often took months to complete, with progress not measured on the surface by slow advances but rather indiscernibly within the artist himself. After months of fastidious observation came an almost spiritual denouement. This final act—lasting only a fraction of the total time spent at work on any given picture—formed the substance of each of Kossoff’s finished oil paintings.

Fidelma in a Red Chair is exceptional in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Most of his pictures were realised over long periods of sustained sittings, with the sitter holding the same pose as the artist endlessly painted, scraped away and re-painted. Although the artist’s deep familiarity with the sitter undoubtedly made possible Fidelma in a Red Chair, Kavanagh has recalled that this work ‘is the only painting I know of that was completed in one sitting. It was never scraped off like the rest, and I never took that “pose” again.’ Despite his frequent protests about the struggles and difficulty of painting, Kossoff emerges from Fidelma in a Red Chair as a painter with both daring fluency and forceful invention.

This painting was on long-term loan to The Hugh Lane, Dublin, between 1993 and 2024.