Peter Paul Rubens’s painting Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (c. 1629-30, National Gallery), more commonly known as ‘Peace and War’, is a complex multi-figure allegory. However, it was not the political or rhetorical aspects of Rubens’s painting which attracted Leon Kossoff when he first began drawing from it in the 1950s. Writing to the organisers of a South Bank Centre exhibition in 1987, Kossoff explained the appeal of painting from other artists: In my work done in the National Gallery and elsewhere from the works of others I have always been a student. From the earliest days when I scribbled from the Rembrandts in the Mond Room my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind. In the copies, made in the studio, I have always tried to remain as faithful to the original, whilst trying to deepen my understanding of them. For Kossoff, working from paintings by another artist was always about developing his own practice. As he explained to the art critic and philosopher Richard Wollheim in 2000, ‘It opens doors for you to go on with your own work, or it’s nothing.’ As such, though Kossoff was motivated to study from Rubens out of self-improvement, the resulting works have an integrity and individuality which is entirely that of their maker. Kossoff started making charcoal studies from Rubens in the early 1960s. He was assiduous in drawing and re-drawing during regular visits to the National Gallery, though only a small number of such drawings have survived – he habitually destroyed work which he regarded as inferior. The remarkable longevity of Kossoff’s interest in Rubens’s Peace and War meant that over a lifetime he was able to assimilate the painting until drawing from the composition became fluent and even sensuous, as in this detailed and tightly-woven rendering. The distinguishing feature of Kossoff’s draughtsmanship is the compelling integration of figures into a single, rhythmic, pulsating composition. As is appropriate to Rubens, this specific charcoal and pastel study is marked by a repeating sequence of supply rounded graphic markings, often applied and re-applied. These smooth streaks of charcoal animate the contours of each figure and imbue a sense of frenetic movement. Not content with a singular treatment, Kossoff returned repeatedly to this subject and this drawing was made some fifteen years after a large-scale oil painting of the same painting by Rubens – itself a landmark work in the artist’s development. * In addition to his career as a painter, Rubens was also a scholar and a diplomat, and the allegory in Peace and War (fig. 1) was of his own devising. The central female figure is Peace (Pax). She is feeding the cherubic figure of Pallas, the god of plenty. She is assisted in the foreground by a swarthy satyr, accompanied by a leopard and a cherub. Meanwhile, forces of darkness are being kept away by the helmeted figure of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. She pushes away the armoured figure of Mars, bringer of war, who is accompanied by one of the Furies and a harpy. There is a group of four child-like figures in the right-side foreground, one of whom appears to be Hymen, the god of matrimony. To the left of the painting, two nude female figures bearing treasures and a tambourine enter, as if in dance – a complement to the malignant forces who are leaving at the other end of the composition.