Leon Kossoff started visiting the National Gallery as a young boy, aged nine, and the collection was a source of deep and lasting fascination for him. A lifelong resident of London, the city of his birth, he paid weekly visits to the gallery and drew from certain choice works repeatedly and without cessation. Sometime in the 1980s, he also began visiting exhibitions – primarily those at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts – where he was frequently granted early entry, permitting him to draw from works by Titian (1983, Royal Academy) and Poussin (1995, Royal Academy) undisturbed by the visiting public. In his humility, Kossoff regarded his drawings from other painters – Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Poussin, Rubens, Cézanne and Constable among them – as educational exercises. Throughout his career, even at the time of his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1995, he spoke of ‘learning to draw’. It was this restless feeling of insecurity and dissatisfaction which motivated him to draw repeatedly from the same paintings, and which charges Kossoff’s drawings with urgency and often drama. Though he had developed a distinctive graphic style of rapid outlines and richly unresolved charcoal effects some decades previously, he refused to recognise any such continuity in his work; at a personal level, he regarded each new drawing as if he were starting his artistic career from the beginning. Though he drew from many different canonical artists, Kossoff had a creative relationship with each one individually. His letters to John Berger from June 1995 make clear a considerable level of practical understanding about other artists’ work, from Veronese to Velázquez. He read about and visited exhibitions of these artists’ work, and his private aesthetic experience of museum art was perhaps the most refined among any artist of his generation. His eighty-year-long relationship with Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing, for example, was marked by an unfailing sense of wonder at the earlier artist’s achievement. Writing in 1987, Kossoff explained that his own drawings from Rembrandt and others were partly intended ‘to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind’. His drawings are not straightforwardly artistic activities as such, but aesthetic experiments belonging to a larger project – a lifelong practical exploration of how and why art moves us. Kossoff first saw Paul Cézanne’s painting Pastoral (Idyll) (1870, Musée d’Orsay) in an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, held between April and August 1988. The exhibition, The Early Work of Cézanne, was the first ‘blockbuster’ display dedicated to this period of the artist’s career – a period remarkable for its vigorous, unsettled handling of paint and its bleak, haunting imagery. The representation of the human figure held a fascination for Kossoff and this drawing from Cézanne pays special attention to the tense, naked bodies of the bathers, stretching and lounging at the waterside. As this drawing suggests, Kossoff was often attracted in historical art to palpable, heavily worked nude figures comparable to those which appear in his own work.