A celebration of figurative painting from the last 100 years and the artists driven to capture human life on canvas.

Lucian Freud wanted ‘paint to work as flesh does’, and in this exhibition he is himself worked into paint in a portrait by Francis Bacon, displayed in public for the first time in over 50 years. As well as outstanding and rarely seen works by Freud and Bacon, lesser known figurative artists from the same era are featured such as Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego.

Works by artists including Walter Sickert and David Bomberg show how the desire to explore life through the focused and intimate representation of people was developing in the previous generation.