Text from Andrea Rose “Leon Kossoff, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings” 2021:

The art historian Richard Kendall wrote to Kossoff after seeing this painting, among others, in Kossoff ’s solo show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, held in 2013:

Early on a Saturday morning in December I went through driving snow to see your exhibition in New York. Because of the snow, I initially had the pictures to myself and could look and ponder undisturbed for almost an hour. Perhaps it was due to the brightness outside, but I had never before appreciated the depth of colour in even your most monochromatic-seeming drawings and paintings. I have always been moved by your early studies of north London, partly by the post-war vistas that you tackled so bravely and even more by the sense of a profoundly original artistic vocabulary struggling into being ...

I know that you don’t welcome long eulogies, so I’ll be brief. Again and again I found the pictures in New York not just magnificently constructed and resolved, but deeply, movingly felt. I could only delight again in the bursting energy and clamorous colours of the swimming pools, the magnificent Kilburn Underground pictures (which always remind me of Giotto and the Arena Chapel frescoes) and the improbably majestic Cherry Trees ... And then the new Arnold Circus drawings, so fresh and full of light, with something very like youthfulness animating a seemingly unpromising site. (Letter, 12 January 2014; Leon Kossoff Archive)