As a painter he stood outside the mainstream. He exhibited at the Salon only twice in his career and his pictures were rarely seen by a wider public. If Daumier had the talent to be a painter he did not have the temperament: "I start everything 25 times over," he said. "In the end I do it all in two days." He nevertheless had a very distinctive style. The human figure remained his central motif but the social commentary of his caricatures was replaced by images treating Don Quixote, the Bible and classical mythology — themes perhaps a bit too appropriate to fine art. More natural were his Realist pictures of passengers in train carriages and figures from the street, whether of art lovers in print shops or street performers. His antecedents here are the Dutch genre painters of the 17th century and in his bistre colouring he shares both their earthiness and non-judgmental viewpoint.

Daumier's successors, however, were not painters or caricaturists but photographers. It was not the Impressionists, who also painted the quotidian, who best understood him but the likes of Walker Evans, André Kertész, Paul Strand and Dorothea Lange in the 20th century who adopted his most obvious trait: unsentimental sympathy.

One artist whose ability to straddle the worlds of graphic art and painting has never been doubted is Dürer. A selection of his exquisite drawings is on show at the Courtauld Gallery in The Young Dürer: Drawing the Figure. The works here exhibit not just his determination to understand the form of the human body but also to release its expressive potential. His success was such that Erasmus called him the "Apelles of black lines" and lauded his ability to express "the whole mind of man as it reflects itself in the behaviour of the body".

The exhibition focuses on the years between circa 1490 and 1496 when, aged 19, he travelled through Germany, the Netherlands and possibly Italy learning his craft from different masters. This period, the Wanderjahre, which culminated with Dürer's return to Nuremberg and his establishment there as a master, gave him the ambition to study the figure from nature rather than the pattern books that artists often used. This meant looking closely at his own body in order to unravel human anatomy: "For in truth, art lies hidden within nature: he who can wrest it from her, has it." 

The drawings on show include both the schematic and the detailed. There are studies of his left leg and left hand, a self-portrait and a beautiful sketch of his new wife, Agnes, looking pensive — it is touchingly inscribed simply Mein Agnes. Some of the drawings are preparation for prints but others are simply the result of his artistic curiosity.

This then is a rare gathering of some 50 drawings and prints by both Dürer and artists such as Martin Schongauer who influenced him. Alongside the pleasures gifted  by the works themselves the exhibition also offers the opportunity to see how great artists are not born but made.