Leon Kossoff is one of the most important figurative painters at work today and is commonly assoictaed with a circle of School of London painters that includes Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and R.B. Kitaj.

At the centre of Kossoff's work is the human figure either in isolation or in urban or domestic settings and the subject is always intimately known, whether it be the seated studio subject or people in the streets of the city.