Peter Paul Rubens’s painting Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (c. 1629-30, National Gallery), more commonly known as ‘Peace and War’, is a complex multi-figure allegory. However, it was not the political or rhetorical aspects of Rubens’s painting which attracted Leon Kossoff when he first began drawing from it in the 1950s. Writing to the organisers of a South Bank Centre exhibition in 1987, Kossoff explained the appeal of painting from other artists:

In my work done in the National Gallery and elsewhere from the works of others I have always been a student. From the earliest days when I scribbled from the Rembrandts in the Mond Room my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind. In the copies, made in the studio, I have always tried to remain as faithful to the original, whilst trying to deepen my understanding of them.

For Kossoff, working from paintings by another artist was always about developing his own practice. As he explained to the art critic and philosopher Richard Wollheim in 2000, ‘It opens doors for you to go on with your own work, or it’s nothing.’ As such, though Kossoff was motivated to study from Rubens out of self-improvement, the resulting works have an integrity and individuality which is entirely that of their maker.

This is the only oil painting that Kossoff made from Rubens. He made many charcoal studies (fig. 1) from Rubens in the thirty years prior to making this work, however, and was assiduous in drawing and re-drawing during regular visits to the National Gallery. The remarkable longevity of Kossoff’s interest in Rubens’s Peace and War meant that over a lifetime he was able to assimilate the painting, until drawing from the composition became almost automatic.

Though drawings from Peace and War were executed in front of the painting itself, this large-scale painting was executed in Kossoff’s studio. The inscription at lower right, ’17 June 1981’, suggests that Kossoff painted the work in a single day – a bold yet plausible claim, owing to the speed at which he worked. His practice was to paint quickly, painting and scraping away in rapid succession. This work would have been painted and repainted over the course of several months, only arriving at this final iteration when all of the key aspects of the composition were satisfactorily resolved.

Working from both his own drawings and a highly developed mental image of Rubens’s painting, Study from 'Minerva Protects Pax from Mars' by Rubens is a product of Kossoff’s own creative process. The term ‘study’ in the title has a specific meaning in Kossoff’s work, not indicating the secondary nature of a painting he has made but rather referring to a rich, imaginative and life-long aspect of his career – making new art from old. The individuality and independence of these works is visually evident. This particular painting, for example, exhibits all the defining characteristics found in the artist’s other figural work: the tumultuous, open-grained paint surface; the distinctive grey-brown colour used to paint human skin; the non-naturalistic notes of dazzling colour, in this case red, blue, green and yellow; and the strident outlines, which highlight the bones and contours of the figures.

As painters, the central concern shared by Kossoff and Rubens was the nude figure. Along with Peace and War, Kossoff also made drawings from two other paintings by Rubens, The Judgement of Paris and The Brazen Serpent, both of which include the voluptuous female figures that recur in Rubens’s art. Both artists painted people they were intimate with. Though the classical tradition provides a subtext to their paintings, there is a compelling human content apparent in both artists’ work.

Aside from Rubens, Kossoff worked from many other artists’ paintings in the National Gallery, including those by Rembrandt, Poussin, Velazquez and Constable. These works by Kossoff have a special status in his career, being at once highly individual works in their own right while also representing the artist’s humility and his willingness to continue learning from the canon of Western art. However, despite Kossoff’s humble intentions, this work – Study from ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ by Rubens – has a magnitude and painterly sophistication that propels it into the annals of art history: an independent artistic achievement in painting which supervenes the earlier intellectual landmark of Rubens’s allegory.

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In addition to his career as a painter, Rubens was also a scholar and a diplomat, and the allegory in Peace and War (fig. 2) was of his own devising. The central female figure is Peace (Pax). She is feeding the cherubic figure of Pallas, the god of plenty. She is assisted in the foreground by a swarthy satyr, accompanied by a leopard and a cherub. Meanwhile, forces of darkness are being kept away by the helmeted figure of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. She pushes away the armoured figure of Mars, bringer of war, who is accompanied by one of the Furies and a harpy. There is a group of four child-like figures in the right-side foreground, one of whom appears to be Hymen, the god of matrimony. To the left of the painting, two nude female figures bearing treasures and a tambourine enter, as if in dance – a complement to the malignant forces who are leaving at the other end of the composition.