King’s Cross, Summer is a monumental painting of London that encompasses urban landscape, seasonal atmospherics and the psychological intensity of the crowd. The main elevation of King’s Cross Station, built of pale yellow brick, darkened by dirt, looms behind a small throng of passing figures. The architectural backdrop fills the upper register of the painting and quaveringly recedes to the right of the composition. Leon Kossoff perceived the city as a teeming, restless entity, a network whose dizzying complexity bestowed it with a supervenient consciousness. In this painting the human activity at street level intersects with grand structures of the public realm to produce a drama that is compelling but unexceptional. In the sixties Kossoff had painted railway lines from York Way, just behind King’s Cross Station, and his paintings of the terminal building itself and the area in front of it, made in 1997 and 1998, marked a return of sorts. For the purpose of making these paintings, Kossoff used a room in the derelict Grand Midland Hotel nearby which served as a temporary studio. The luminous palette of King’s Cross, Summer, dominated by pale notes of blue, green, yellow and pink, is in keeping with the season of the painting’s subject; such brilliance evokes the sultry days of a warm summer.

Kossoff painted London throughout his long career, and the longevity of this preoccupation led him to develop a sophisticated concept of this most complex subject. Writing at the time of Kossoff’s Venice Biennale exhibition in 1995, the curator Andrea Rose referred to ‘Kossoff’s interest in the city’s infrastructure, the labyrinthine web that connects the city’s surface to its bowels and all levels between.’ She continued: ‘Stations, junctions, railways bridges and booking halls are all part of the huge arterial system that keeps people on the move, circulating them round the city in an almost Dantesque rhythm.’ Some decades earlier in 1973, Kossoff himself observed that his paintings of London are invested with a bewildering combination of longing, nostalgia and psychological animation:

The strange ever changing light, the endless streets and the shuddering feel of the sprawling city lingers in my mind like a faintly glimmering memory of a long forgotten, perhaps never experienced childhood, which, if rediscovered and illuminated, would ameliorate the pain of the present.

A new phase in Kossoff’s paintings of London began in 1993 when he started to depict Embankment Underground Station and the fruit and flower stalls just outside. He treated the subject in five paintings completed in 1994 and 1995. For the preceding three decades Kossoff had tended to paint in the outer reaches, especially the neighbourhood around his home in Willesden Green and the streets near his studio in Dalston, as well as Hawksmoor’s church in Spitalfields. A series made in 1987–1993, ‘Here Comes the Diesel!’, depicted the railway line at the bottom of his garden. His long-standing interest in Kilburn Underground Station, which he represented in paintings made between 1976 and 1987, was motivated in part by its proximity to a studio he kept in Kilburn. In a marked contrast, the Embankment paintings and those of King’s Cross that followed represent a sustained exploration of locales in central London.

Turning his attention away from Embankment Underground Station, Kossoff went on to depict the pedestrianised area before the entrance to King’s Cross Station. He began to make drawings in situ there in 1997. Between October 1997 and December 1998, Kossoff painted seven large-scale paintings of this subject. Besides King’s Cross, Summer, he painted:

• King’s Cross, October Evening, 1997, oil on board, 183 x 205.5 cm, Private Collection, Los Angeles;
• King’s Cross, Bright October, 1997, oil on board, 147 x 198 cm, Würth Collection, Künzelsau;
• King’s Cross, March Afternoon, 1998, oil on board, 147 x 198 cm, Private Collection;
• King’s Cross, Spring No. 1, 1998, oil on board, 134 x 142 cm, Private Collection;
• King’s Cross, Spring No. 2, 1998, oil on board, 148 x 134 cm, Private Collection;
• Tube Entrance, Winter Evening, 1998, oil on board, 162.5 x 148 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

These paintings along with nine drawings, executed in charcoal and pastel, were shown together in a solo exhibition held in 2000, which opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and toured to Annely Juda Fine Art in London.

Although King’s Cross, Summer represents a bustling, crowded area full of strangers, Kossoff’s painting transforms these passers-by into credible individuals. The woman in a red dress in the centre of the painting is especially vivid and engaging. Each figure in the painting has a human presence. Writing in 1987, the artist explained the process of this transformation:

And so it is with all my so called “crowd” paintings. Although made from numerous drawings done in the street over long periods of time, at the final moment each person becomes someone particular that I know. It is as though, apart from the obvious subject matter, these pictures are about the people in my head.

It is not recorded which people were in Kossoff’s head at the time of painting King’s Cross, Summer. But the woman in the red dress is narrowly similar to the same figure in one of the Embankment paintings, The Flower and Fruit Stalls, Embankment, August. In a catalogue essay for Kossoff’s solo exhibition in 2000, Klaus Kertess observed that the woman in the red dress is one example of those figures who ‘acquire the features of one or another of the studio subjects.’ The artist’s female sitters in 1998 and 1999 were Fidelma Kavanagh, Cathy Goodhead, and Kossoff’s wife Peggy, and one of them is perhaps inadvertently the central figure in King’s Cross, Summer.