Life Studies: David Eustace, Rebecca Westguard & William Crosbie, The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6HZ, 0131 558 1200, scottish-gallery.co.uk Until 27 February

At one point in the recent history of art, life drawing was The Thing. Not only that, it was the very foundation on which a professional art education was grounded. To understand the human figure, you had to draw it from life until your fingers bled.

Today, the life room in our art schools has been mainly consigned to history, although there is still an appetite for life drawing. Any night of the week around our cities and towns you can find a life class if you really want to. There's even an ever-expanding grass-roots organisation called All The Young Nudes (a nod to the consummate artist that was the late David Bowie), which fuses life drawing and music. It meets weekly in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and recently branched down to London.

This desire to get to grips with the human form is writ large in a new exhibition called Life Studies at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, which takes the work of three very different artists; David Eustace, Rebecca Westguard and the late William Crosbie, and sets them side-by-side. All three get up close and personal with the human body. All three do it in very different mediums and reach a very different conclusion.

Eustace is perhaps the best known name in the mix. A veteran of glossy magazines such as Vogue, Elle, GQ and Tatler, the 54-year-old former prison warden's portraits are always vividly honest and direct. Last year he was the first photographer in the gallery's illustrious 173-year-long history to exhibit with them.

There are 19 new works by Eustace hung in a small central space in the gallery. Anyone expecting a touch of showbiz will be disappointed. This is a muted body of work. His subjects are not personalities. They are beautiful arrangements in light, shape and contour. In works such as Green Drape, Standing and Michael Seated with Cloth Wrap, it's all about the tones, the shapes, the touches of light on skin. There's a back-to-Victorian basics about the way he's stripping back the artifice of photography which we've all become inured to as consumers.

Eustace is clearly pushing his own boundaries out here and enjoying himself. One of the largest photographs, Michael's Head, is so fuzzy it is almost abstract. In my head, I'm hearing fellow editorial photographers (an opinionated lot, let me tell you…) admonish their colleague for its lack of focus. But to my mind, it's the strongest work in the pack.

The theme of nudity may run through this show, but the artists – and their work – couldn't be more different. The show came about by happenstance when Eustace introduced Westguard to Peploe and Jansen. Eustace had bought a life drawing from Westguard some years ago and the two had kept in touch.

Westguard, who is not yet 40, lives and works in the North East of Scotland and teaches drawing at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. She has an innate feeling for the human form. As she puts it herself, she likes to "navigate" her way around a drawing "until the form emerges with a process of transparency… with a kind of incessant structural mapping."

There is no erotic charge in her large bravura pencil drawings of naked figures on canvas and handmade Himalayan paper. They are curled in foetal balls or sleeping. Their lack of energy gives you time to consider her line, the curves she takes with her pencil and the folds of skin next to cloth. I could look at them all day. They make me want to pick up a pencil and get back to life drawing (after a hiatus of nearly 20 years).

The third artist in the pack is the late William Crosbie. By contrast with the other two, his work is big, bold and occasionally nakedly erotic. His female figures, draped and staring absently to the side or face-on are studies in the available light in which he drew or painted them in his Glasgow studio. In one work, Blonde Nude Against Striped Gold Background his model's skin tones fizz with the artificial green light of his studio

Crosbie, who died in 1999 at the age of 83, studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1932-34 and lived in Paris from 1937-39 studying painting and life drawing under Fernand Léger and Aris de Maillol. Their influence is clear. He painted the human figure throughout his professional life and exhibiting these drawings and paintings alongside more contemporary work turns this whole fascinating exhibition full circle.

ends

Life Studies: David Eustace, Rebecca Westguard & William Crosbie, The Scottish Gallery, Dundas Street, Edinburgh until February 27

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

On Wednesday (February 10) Rebecca Westguard is holding a life drawing class in the Dundas Street gallery space from 6.30pm-9pm. Limited spaces available, booking essential.