Seated Figure No. 1 depicts the writer N.M. Seedo. She is seated and seems to be asleep, with her eyes closed and her head dropping to one side. Her hands are clasped together in her lap, indicated by the sweep of her arms and small knots of paint evoking her fingers. The painting is executed in a narrow range of colours, primarily brown, ochre and red, with lighter pigment used to delineate her eyes, brows, mouth and head. Channels have been made in the paint around the figure, perhaps using some tool other than a brush. (Some of Kossoff’s work of this period was apparently raked over with his fingers.) The channels emanate from the figure in sequential ripples, creating a visual echo which emphasises the contours of the figure. Andrea Rose has described how ‘her presence seems to activate the space around her as she slumbers in the studio chair’.

Helen Lessore wrote of Kossoff’s models that ‘many have had hard lives, which have shaped both their physical and mental attitudes.’ This is especially true of Sonia Husid, better known by her penname, N.M. Seedo, who was an important sitter in Kossoff’s early career. They came to be related when Seedo’s mother and Kossoff’s grandfather married in 1935. Born in 1906, she was two decades older than Kossoff, yet they formed a warm friendship that emerged over the course of many long sittings. The first of these took place in 1952 at Kossoff’s studio in Mornington Crescent. As was to become his common practice, he started to work from Seedo by drawing her in charcoal and pastel. He continued to make drawings for five years before he made an oil painting of her. Seated Figure No. 1 is the second of twelve completed paintings which Seedo sat for between 1957 and 1965. Five of these were full-length figure paintings and the remaining seven depict only her head. Seedo’s fictionalised autobiography, In the Beginning was Fear, gives an account of posing for Kossoff.

The struggle he was engaged in in his work was nerve-racking, he seemed to go through heaven and hell, falling in love with every happy stroke of the brush, and hating all the obstacles, all the distortions and misleading paths that the canvas, paint and brush put in his way to some unknown goal.

Between 1957 and 1964, Kossoff held five exhibitions with Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Seated Figure No. 1 was exhibited at those held in 1959 and 1964. Lessore was Kossoff’s earliest and most ardent supporter, marketing his work at an early stage in his career and proving to be one of his most eloquent critical interpreters. She wrote an insightful essay on his work which was published in 1986. After Lessore’s gallery closed in 1965, Seated Figure No. 1 passed to her descendants. It has not been offered for sale since then and has not been publicly exhibited since the 1960s.