L.S. Lowry in his Studio.

Lowry 's works offer a record of the culture and industrial landscape of the North with his unique characteristic figures.

Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and came with his family to England in 1937. Internationally acknowledged as one of the most important artists working today, Freud was described by the Australian art critic, Robert Hughes as "the greatest living realist painter". He has redefined portraiture and the nude through his unblinking scrutiny of the human form. Although best known as a painter, etching has become an integral part of his practice.Freud treats the etching plate like a canvas, standing the copper upright on an easel. In etchings as in painting, Freud demarcates his models forms through meticulous networks of finely etched lines. With the figures isolated against empty backgrounds, his etchings achieve a sense of psychological tension and formal abstraction. Freud's subjects are the people in his life. "My work is purely autobiographical...It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know...When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put into a painting, what will suite me and what won't.There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so" -Lucian Freud