Spanning over a century of British art, Drawn from Life: People on Paper brings together over 50 drawings by some of Britain’s most celebrated artists.

Artists have been drawing the figure for centuries, from carefully composed life drawings to people caught unaware at leisure or work. The majority of the drawings in this publication are drawn from observation, though some are from memory or imagination; some are unfinished studies while others are finished works in their own right. Perhaps some of the most surprising examples are those from very early on in artists’ careers, such as a self-portrait by Richard Hamilton from 1938, the carefully drawn Mrs Ash Asleep by Howard Hodgkin from 1952, Peter Blake’s Portrait of a Man from 1950, and Eduardo Paolozzi’s Drawings from Rembrandt, 1945.

Author Martin Herbert explores these small masterpieces from the Arts Council Collection to uncover the development of figurative drawing in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Artists include Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Lucian Freud, Elisabeth Frink, Antony Gormley, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Gwen John, Michael Landy, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Euan Uglow, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and many others.