This painting is one of only thirty-five surviving self-portraits by Leon Kossoff. Several are in public collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, and some remain with the family, whence this portrait comes.

Text by Andrea Rose, author of the Catalogue raisonné:

This small ‘Self-Portrait’, measuring only 9 3/4 x 8 inches, was one of Kossoff’s favourites. It is one of a small group of works that he kept throughout his life, and which he chose neither to exhibit nor offer for sale. It’s a work of immense power and perception, despite its small size and restrained colour. The artist is 48 years old. At this stage in his life, he has a studio in Dalston Junction in East London, and is producing a number of extraordinary landscapes of the area, one of which, ‘Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction, Summer’ (cat.rais 167), was produced in the same year as this ‘Self-Portrait’, and was bought by the Tate Gallery the following year. Both the landscape, on a large scale, and the self-portrait, on a small scale, are full of a self-disciplined passion. Kossoff’s head, turning to look outwards at us, takes up almost the whole picture plane. He is in fact looking at himself in a mirror as he paints, and is exploring his actions with an almost quizzical note of exploration. He isn’t of course just trying to convey the outward semblance of physiognomy, but the inner workings of his mind as he’s doing it – inner and outer life mirroring each other in Kossoff’s expressive brushwork. His chin, nose, lips and eyes are picked out in long, fluid strokes of black, but between all these points are a mass of energetic brushings. The colour is subdued, but the paint feels as if it is constantly on the move, as if it were pulsating and alive, background and facial features almost merging into another. This is Kossoff’s genius. That in such a tiny space, he can convey the sense of a living individual, full of doubt and interrogation, but constantly searching for resolution. This is not a decorative painting, but a dramatic one. Without flashiness or showiness, he has condensed the experience of a single individual, living in a particular moment in time, to produce a portrait that lives well beyond the moment in which it was painted, as if the artist were still present, and the painting itself in a constant state of renewal.