Leon Kossoff has long admired ‘the old masters’, ever since his first visit to the National Gallery as a nine-year-old boy. Having first been captivated by Rembrandt, an interest in Rubens, Velázquez and Poussin was to follow. He has explained that ‘my attitude to these works has always been… to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.’ In a long-standing agreement, Kossoff often visits the National Gallery before opening hours to spend time drawing. For him, drawing is a form of investigation, allowing him to absorb some of the creative energy which emanates from the objects of his study. Kossoff’s paintings and drawings from the old masters form a small and distinct group in his working life. As he wrote in 1987, ‘I have always regarded these activities as quite separate from my other work and only once, a long time ago, have I consciously used one of these works in the making of my own pictures.’ Though these works capture the outline of their sources, they possess a vitality all of their own – a potent mixture of painterly animus and psychological nuance. He has painted approximately twenty oil paintings after other artists’ works, of which this is a uniquely jewel-like example. Speaking in 2006, Kossoff described Nicolas Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora (c. 1630, National Gallery) (fig. 16) as ‘a painting about love’. The painting is from the end of Poussin’s early career, a period characterised by warm tonal values which indicate the influence of Venice. Poussin’s painting pulses with a dull glow, suggestive of twilight and charged with sensuality. In this Study for Copy, made after Cephalus and Aurora, Kossoff transposed Poussin’s palette into hues of cream, grey-brown and green. This hints to the process by which Kossoff’s visual imagination absorbs a subject. After repeated drawing in charcoal and pastel, the subject is produced anew, with new vitality independent of the original source. Though this work is a ‘study for a copy’, it nevertheless occupies its own artistic space, separate from that of Poussin’s work. This painting belongs to a series of three works, all entitled Study for Copy of “Cephalus and Aurora” by Poussin. All three were produced in 1976 and subsequently exhibited at the Fischer Fine Art exhibition of Kossoff’s work held in 1979. He returned to the subject in 1981, making a further cycle of three paintings, this time entitled From “Cephalus and Aurora” by Poussin. These three works were exhibited at the Hirschl & Adler exhibition of Kossoff’s work held in March 1983. Kossoff wrote in 1987 about how he uses the work of earlier painters. He explained that ‘my attitude to these works has always been… to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.’ By making his own work from Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurora, Kossoff hoped to uncover the hidden genius of the old master’s painting. This desire to understand the transformative power of art has been an essential motive throughout Kossoff’s career.