Kossoff was a fellow pupil at Bomberg’s life drawing and composition classes at the Borough Polytechnic in London and took on Metzger’s Mornington Crescent studio when he left London.
This portrait is one of three associated works depicting émigrée Sonia Husid (1906–1985), known by her nom de plume N. M. Seedo. Possibly a distant relative of Kossoff’s, she was an important model for the artist in this period. She refers to their friendship in her semi-autobiographical account, In the Beginning was Fear (1964), which also movingly describes her experiences of pogroms, fear and loss in Romania. In this empathic portrait Kossoff clearly conveys her strength through suffering.
An advocate of Yiddish culture and a member of the Romanian Communist Party, she settled in England in 1930. She married fellow immigrant and Yiddish writer Y. I. Lisky (originally Yehuda Itamar Fuchs, official name Summer Fuchs) in London in 1935; they subsequently divorced and remarried in 1970.