Some years back I used to attend, as its London chairman, Sotheby’s annual exhibition of work by the employees of the auction house. As you would expect from men and women whose careers depended on the attribution and valuation of works of art and artefact, the standard was high. A senior member of the Book Department, I remember, surprised us all by metamorphosing into a maker of harpsichords and violins. But the work that most took hold of me was a large and violent drawing: a nude female torso. It had the impact and presence of a successful oil painting. Female nudes in art are like commas in prose; men, after all, had painting and sculpture more or less to themselves until well into the last century. There was something forceful, rather than titillating, about this torso. I bet myself that the author was female, and won. I bought the drawing and met the artist, Julia Rosier. She appeared unlike the drawing, being tall and glamorous. She was an ex-model. She told me she wanted to stick with drawing as she found it more expressive than paint.

She could not afford models and worked from her own form, sometimes mirrored, sometimes photographed, and from a man friend. When later on I admired a pregnant torso, she told me that came from the imagination. She had no children.

This was in the mid-1990s. Now Julia, with a husband and a daughter, has returned to London after living and working in France. These forceful drawings of French film stars – two women, one man – display the same visual intelligence that earlier attracted me. They take a world of glamour and deglamorise it. They show the skull beneath the skin.

In theory, an artist as gifted as Julia Rosier should move on, into oil paint. In practice, I am glad she has not yet done so. Drawing of this quality is neither adjunct nor preparation but the real right thing itself.