For four years between 1949 and ‘53, Frank Auerbach learned to draw in evening classes held at the Borough Polytechnic in South London. His teacher was the painter David Bomberg, an artist of conviction whose expressionist work went unrecognised in his lifetime. In Auerbach’s words, he had an ‘original, stubborn, radical intelligence’, and these qualities rubbed off on some of his students. Auerbach took much from Bomberg’s draughtsmanship: his use of scabrous charcoal, the repeating pattern of energetic rubbing off and redrawing, and the blasphemous need to give the image a life of its own. As Auerbach acknowledged later, it was Bomberg’s ‘practical instruction’ which made an impact on him. The restless mood of the evening classes was also a formative influence on Auerbach and shaped his subsequent approach to working from life models. As he explained, There was a radical atmosphere in those classes. There was a feeling that in the rest of the art schools something presentable had to be presented, but in those classes there was an atmosphere of research and of radicalism which was extremely stimulating. For me, very few works that could be described as works of art were produced there, but anything that seemed artificial or concocted or sort of a false sauce or gravy on an insufficiently vital fact would be rejected by Bomberg. Though aspects of his drawing style changed in subsequent decades, for the rest of his career Auerbach retained the same restless sense of research – striving for a ‘vital fact’ – which he discovered in Bomberg’s classes. Nude Standing was made when Auerbach was a student at the Royal College of Art (1952-55), shortly after he left Bomberg’s life classes. He has described achieving a sense of artistic independence as early as 1952. In line with this assertion, early drawings like this show an unusual degree of consistency with his subsequent output. The firm application and jagged quality of the mark-making and the integral quality of the marks themselves in constituting the subject are comparable to Auerbach’s later draughtsmanship. Though in later years he always used the same long-serving sitters, Nude Standing was probably made in a single sitting from a model in the RCA life-drawing class. Auerbach used a number of life drawings from this period as the basis for Six Drypoints of the Nude (1954). As he has said, ‘I chose six drawings which were still fairly fresh in my mind, out of several hundred (the vast majority of these drawings I later destroyed)’. One drypoint from that series – ‘Standing Figure’ (fig. 1) – is closely related to Nude Standing. The arced shoulders, nodding head and protruding midriff are the same, which suggests that either Nude Standing or another drawing of the same life-room pose was the source for Auerbach’s contemporaneous drypoint. Another drawing (fig. 2) of the same date was owned by the film director Clive Donner. It shows the same consistent graphic approach: the outlines of the figure are clearly defined, areas of shadow flash like electricity around the model’s body, and salient areas of modelling are emphasised with the addition of red-ochre pastel or crayon. As Auerbach has said, he later destroyed many of these life drawings from the early 1950s. Surviving examples like Nude Standing and Study of a Nude provide important insights into the development of the artist’s draughtsmanship, demonstrating the early stage at which he formulated a forceful, unpretentious way to approach the defining subject of his career.