Leon Kossoff

York Way Railway Bridge, Evening is a trainscape painted by Leon Kossoff in an early period of maturity in his career. The palette is dominated by earth colours of mud brown and ochre yellow, yet large quantities of unmixed red and blue are also apparent within the mire of heavily worked paint. The complex textures of the surface are underpinned by the thickened, clay-like substance of the paint, and the inventive manipulation of paint after it was applied with a brush. The whole tableau is grooved with rhythmically incised channels, many of them running in parallel lines for short stretches, and these condition the image and give it a pulse of movement and compositional direction.

Notwithstanding its material complexities, York Way Railway Bridge, Evening is a wholly representational image. Its subject is the railway lines that run into Kings Cross Station, and the eponymous road that crosses over the tracks as they curve away to the north east. The channels of paint clearly register the movement of both the road, which is a receding diagonal at the middle right-hand side of the image, and the tracks, which sprawl across the foreground from the lower left-hand corner and spread diagonally upwards until they meet the road bridge. This area of Kings Cross was then occupied by a goods yard, and a prominent feature of the painting is the framework of vertical and horizontal structures then used to load and unload freight from stationary trains. Dark, dense outlines at the horizon indicate buildings, and the lowered key of the painting indicates the time of day as well as, perhaps, the soot-infused atmosphere, clouded by the fumes of coal-fired engines.

York Way was the predominant subject at Kossoff’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in 1968. Another painting of York Way was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue. York Way pictures were among the largest works in the exhibition (the largest measuring 36 by 72 inches) as well as being the most numerous. York Way Railway Bridge, Evening was shown in the exhibition (no. 19), as were the following paintings of the same landscape:

25. York Way railway bridge, from Caledonian Road, stormy day (1967)
26. York Way railway bridge, early morning Dec. 7th (1967)
27. York Way, railway bridge, evening over London (1967)
28. Railway landscape near Kings Cross, dark day (1967)
29. Railway landscape near Kings Cross, Summer (1967)
33. Railway landscape near Kings Cross, early spring (1968)

Related works on paper included:

38. York Way railway bridge, Winter (1966)
40. York Way railway bridge from Caledonian Road (1966)
41. Railway landscape near Kings Cross (1967)
47. Railway landscape near Kings Cross, No. 1 (1967)
48. Railway landscape near Kings Cross, No. 2 (1967)

The other landscape subjects shown in the exhibition were four building sites in Marylebone and a single painting of Willesden Junction.

This painting was first acquired by one of Kossoff’s most committed and appreciative collectors, the Hon. Rosemary Peto (1916–1998). She was married to Lord Hinchingbrooke, the Earl of Sandwich’s heir, and studied part-time at the Royal College of Art in the fifties where she met both Kossoff and his friend Frank Auerbach. Peto acquired a significant collection of Kossoff’s paintings and provided finance for a catalogue to accompany the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1972 retrospective of his work. She also sat for a series of portraits by him.