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. John Constable’s definitive view of Salisbury Cathedral, first exhibited in 1831, was on long-term loan to the National Gallery between the early 1980s and 2013. It was first loaned by its owner, Lord Ashton of Hythe, and was acquired by a consortium of public galleries including the Tate in 2013 after it was offered for sale by Lord Ashton’s executors. Constable’s painting depicts a stormy summer afternoon with a rainbow spreading over the cathedral’s spire. Kossoff was evidently attracted to the fraught, changeable atmosphere represented in the painting, and his drawing from the painting is riven with swift, jagged movement of charcoal – a characteristic motion in his graphic work which makes the air itself seem palpable and dynamic.