Before paint ever touched canvas, before stone met chisel, before an artist could dream of a masterpiece — there was the figure. The human body has been the central subject of visual art for as long as human beings have made it. And for centuries, the serious study of that body, drawn from life, has been considered the non-negotiable foundation of artistic skill. Not a specialization. Not a niche. The foundation.
That tradition — the one that built Raphael, Rubens, Rodin, and hundreds of artists whose names we don’t know — is figure drawing. And understanding why it matters is understanding something essential about Western art itself.
The Academy and the Atelier: Why Figure Drawing Became the Law
When the great European academies of art were founded — the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris (1648), the Royal Academy in London (1768) — they didn’t begin by teaching color theory or perspective. They began with the nude human figure.
The logic was straightforward, if demanding: if you could draw the human body accurately — with all its asymmetries, its subtlety of muscle and fat and bone, the way light falls on curved skin — you could draw anything. The human form was the hardest test. Pass it and the rest of the material world was merely a matter of application.
Students in the ateliers of the 17th through 19th centuries spent years doing nothing but drawing. First from plaster casts of classical sculpture — the Laocoön, the Venus de Milo, fragments of marble torsos — to develop an eye for form without the complication of living movement. Then, finally, admission to the life drawing class. A live model. A pose. Hours with charcoal and paper.
This was considered a privilege. Many students never reached it. The ones who did understood that they had entered the core curriculum of Western art.
Ingres and the Gospel of the Line
No figure in the academic tradition more ferociously embodies the centrality of figure drawing than Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Born in 1780, trained under Jacques-Louis David, Ingres spent his entire career in pursuit of a single thing: the perfect line.
His Odalisque in Grisaille (ca. 1824–34), held today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, demonstrates this obsession at its most concentrated. The painting is deliberately rendered without color — grisaille means painted in grey — stripping away everything but form. What’s left is pure draftsmanship: the reclining nude studied as volume, as contour, as weight in space. It’s not a celebration of sensuality, though sensuality is there. It is primarily an act of looking. A demonstration of how much a trained eye can see and a trained hand can render.
Ingres reportedly spent years drawing the human figure daily well into old age. He believed that to stop was to lose the ability. Figure drawing wasn’t a skill you acquired; it was a practice you maintained.
Why the Body Is the Hardest Subject
Ask any working artist — formally trained or self-taught — and they’ll tell you the same thing: the human body is merciless. A landscape is forgiving. A still life of fruit can be adjusted, simplified, romanticized. But the human figure is something every viewer knows intimately, from the inside. We have all lived in a body. We recognize, instantly and unconsciously, when something is wrong.
The shoulder that doesn’t sit right. The hand that looks stiff. The subtle collapse of weight in a seated pose that, when missed, makes a figure look like a mannequin. Viewers who couldn’t name a single rule of anatomy will feel the violation of it.
This is exactly why the Old Masters used it as their training ground. Drawing the figure accurately, with consistency, required developing observational powers that transferred to everything else. Rembrandt’s ability to render the texture of an old man’s skin; Velázquez’s mastery of how fabric falls over a body; Michelangelo’s ceiling — all of it rooted in the same foundation. Thousands of hours drawing from life.
Modernism Challenged It — and Then Came Back
The 20th century shook the academic tradition to its roots. The Impressionists loosened the line. The Cubists shattered the figure entirely. Abstract Expressionism seemed to abandon the human form altogether. For a few decades, figure drawing felt like a relic — the thing you did before the real work of art began.
But the figure kept coming back.
Lucian Freud painted his subjects with a pitiless, searching realism that owed everything to the life drawing tradition. Alice Neel restored a political and psychological complexity to the painted body that academic painting had never imagined. Philip Pearlstein, Sylvia Sleigh, Jenny Saville — each in their own way returned to the same question the academy had posed: What do you actually see when you look at a human body?
Meanwhile, the life drawing session never disappeared from art schools. It retreated, was sometimes marginalized, occasionally declared dead — and then was rediscovered by each new generation of painters, sculptors, and illustrators who learned, eventually, that you can’t outrun the figure. At some point, if you want to make serious art about human beings, you have to be able to draw one.
Life Drawing Today: A Community, Not Just a Class
Something interesting has happened in the past two decades. Life drawing has migrated out of the academy and into the community. Open figure drawing sessions — once the exclusive province of art schools and private ateliers — are now held in bars, warehouses, galleries, and living rooms. Hundreds of cities host them. They are attended by professional artists, hobbyists, medical illustrators, animators, and people who simply want to practice looking.
The model undresses. The timer starts. The room goes quiet except for the scratch of charcoal.
There is something almost ceremonial about it. A room full of people agreeing, collectively, that looking at the human body with care and attention is a worthwhile thing to do. That the figure deserves study. That the act of drawing it — really drawing it, with all its imperfection and specificity and weight — is itself meaningful.
This is the tradition that events like NALA’s exist within. Not spectacle. Not shock. The continuation of a centuries-old practice that has always understood something the culture regularly forgets: the human body, seen clearly, is endlessly worth looking at.
The Line That Connects Them
From the plaster casts of 17th-century Paris academies to a figure drawing session in a Los Angeles gallery in 2026, the line is unbroken. The technology has changed — the pencils, the lighting, the rooms. The artists have changed — more women, more diversity, more experiments in medium and approach. But the essential act is the same: a person, a body, a sustained act of looking.
Ingres spent 80 years perfecting his line. Rodin said he drew with his eyes closed, feeling the form rather than seeing it. And somewhere tonight, in a studio or a gallery or an art school, someone is setting a timer, picking up a piece of charcoal, and beginning again at the beginning — with the figure.
That’s the foundation. That’s always been the foundation.
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NALA — Nude Art Los Angeles — creates space for the nude in art to be seen, studied, and celebrated on its own terms. If this history resonates with you, we’d love to have you involved. Get involved with NALA →