One of Kossoff's major early drawings, Head of Seedo demonstrates the centrality of drawing as the foundation of the artist's activities as part of a process of ruthless self-criticism, in which numerous drawings are destroyed for every one that survives. As Kossoff himself has explained: 'Drawing is making an image, which expresses commitment and involvement. This only comes about after seemingly endless activity before the model or subject, rejecting time and again ideas which are possible to preconceive... the only true guide in this search is the special relationship the artist has with the person or landscape with which he is working.'

In the catalogue for Kossoff's retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996, Paul Moorhouse writes of the subject of the present drawing: 'Kossoff's principal model was the writer N. M. Seedo who was one of the first of his friends prepared to sit for him regularly. He worked continuously on a group of drawings for about three months, moving from one sheet to the next, constantly erasing and then restating each image. Finally most of these drawings were erased.'

Surviving drawings such as the present work were included in Kossoff's first one-person exhibitions at the famous Beaux Arts Gallery in London. Helen Lessore, who ran the gallery, later recalled that 'if one happened to see a whole row of these life-size charcoal drawings of seated, sleeping figures, glimmering blackly through the glass, leaning against a wall, it was as if one had come upon a row of effigies in the underground darkness of a tomb of kings... Seedo, somnolently brooding like an Eastern idol...' Helen Lessore, 'Leon Kossoff' in A Partial Testament, Tate Gallery Publishing, 1986.

Head of Seedo may be compared to a related drawing in the British Museum, London.