Material Oil on board
Dimensions 152 x 122 cm
Place of Creation London
Price Price available upon inquiry
Status Vetted

About the Work

Fidelma Kavanagh sat for Leon Kossoff between 1978 and the late nineteen-nineties. She was one of the most important models in his career, in part because of the long period over which she sat, yet also because of the depths of pathos and human insight that she inspired in Kossoff. Fidelma in a Red Chair is among Kossoff’s largest and most significant works of the seventies and eighties. It was made in a period of burgeoning self-confidence during which he developed a personally distinctive mode of figure painting.


The nude subject was a hallmark of ‘School of London’ painting and this work epitomises the mesmeric brushwork and psychological intensity which earned Kossoff a place as one of the pre-eminent London School painters, alongside his friend Frank Auerbach and his acquaintances Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Because of American abstract art’s influence, however, it was not until the middle years of their careers that these artists began to win recognition. Fidelma in a Red Chair was painted at precisely the moment at which Kossoff and his peers were beginning to be understood and respected. It is against the background of a decisive change in fortunes that the painting’s confidence and fluency should be

understood.


Fidelma in a Red Chair is exceptional in Kossoff’s oeuvre. Most of his pictures were realised over long periods of sustained sittings, with the sitter holding the same pose as the artist endlessly painted, scraped away and re-painted it. Though the artist’s deep familiarity with the sitter undoubtedly made possible Fidelma in a Red

Chair, Kavanagh has recalled that this work ‘is the only painting I know of that was completed in one sitting. It was never scraped off like the rest, and I never took that “pose” again.’

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Provenance

The Artist
Private Collection, Ireland, given by the artist

Literature

Dawson 2008, p. 201 (dated circa 1980)
Andrea Rose, Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Modern Art Press, 2021, cat. no. 247, p. 322 (col. illus.)

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