Leon Kossoff started visiting the National Gallery as a young boy, aged nine, and the collection was a source of deep and lasting fascination for him. A lifelong resident of London, the city of his birth, he paid weekly visits to the gallery and drew from certain choice works repeatedly and without cessation. Sometime in the 1980s, he also began visiting exhibitions – primarily those at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts – where he was frequently granted early entry, permitting him to draw from works by Titian (1983, Royal Academy) and Poussin (1995, Royal Academy) undisturbed by the visiting public. In his humility, Kossoff regarded his drawings from other painters – Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Poussin, Rubens, Cézanne and Constable among them – as educational exercises. Throughout his career, even at the time of his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1995, he spoke of ‘learning to draw’. It was this restless feeling of insecurity and dissatisfaction which motivated him to draw repeatedly from the same paintings, and which charges Kossoff’s drawings with urgency and often drama. Though he had developed a distinctive graphic style of rapid outlines and richly unresolved charcoal effects some decades previously, he refused to recognise any such continuity in his work; at a personal level, he regarded each new drawing as if he were starting his artistic career from the beginning. Though he drew from many different canonical artists, Kossoff had a creative relationship with each one individually. His letters to John Berger from June 1995 make clear a considerable level of practical understanding about other artists’ work, from Veronese to Velázquez. He read about and visited exhibitions of these artists’ work, and his private aesthetic experience of museum art was perhaps the most refined among any artist of his generation. His eighty-year-long relationship with Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing, for example, was marked by an unfailing sense of wonder at the earlier artist’s achievement. Writing in 1987, Kossoff explained that his own drawings from Rembrandt and others were partly intended ‘to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind’. His drawings are not straightforwardly artistic activities as such, but aesthetic experiments belonging to a larger project – a lifelong practical exploration of how and why art moves us. Rubens’s painting The Brazen Serpent (c. 1635-40, National Gallery) depicts an Old Testament scene in which a plague of fiery serpents devours the Israelites for their sinfulness. The dramatic, multi-figure composition was probably of more interest to Kossoff than the religious timbre of the subject-matter. Kossoff would have known this painting from his earliest visits to the National Gallery as a boy. It is one of only a handful of works by Rubens that he worked from, another being Minerva Protecting Pax from Mars – a comparably dynamic, multi-figure painting.