The Hunter Gracchus is one of Kitaj’s ‘little pictures’. A genre of small-scale figure painting, each work typically included just one, two or three characters painted on unprimed, roughly woven canvases. Kitaj began using them in 2005 and they belong to a final phase of creativity after the ‘Los Angeles’ series concluded. Even as his failing health prevented him from regular work on larger pictures, the small format of these canvases – often measuring no more than 18 inches along one side – enabled him to continue painting with abandon and unfailing invention. The little pictures were generally painted in a draughtsman-like idiom in which touches of brilliant colour covered the surface in a loose net. Many of these paintings were exhibited together in 2006 at Marlborough Fine Art, London, and posthumously in 2008 at Marlborough Gallery, New York. Some aspects of the late little pictures are comparable to Kitaj’s caput mortuum paintings from the late sixties, and the similarities were emphasised by the inclusion of these paintings in the Little Pictures exhibitions.

‘The Hunter Gracchus’ is the title of a short story by Franz Kafka (1883–1924), one of the most highly esteemed Jewish authors in Kitaj’s pantheon. In the story a mythical fourth-century hunter transits across the earth in a restless state of deathly immortality. He fell from a precipice while chasing a chamois, the fall was fatal, yet for reasons unknown he is unable to die. In 1982, discussing the play of sex, love and mortality in his work, Kitaj said: ‘I feel in this matter of my sexuality like Kafka’s guilt-ridden Hunter Gracchus, both dead and not dead and propelled by prehistoric winds. Like Gracchus, one’s sexual ship never allows respite.’ In his Confessions, written in the early 2000s, Kitaj lamented: ‘If only I could infuse Kafka into my pictures without losing my own Soul!’ Painted at the end of Kitaj’s life, The Hunter Gracchus is a self-portrait that gives full expression to the artist’s mortal sorrow.