The personal choice of a local artist gives a different slant to the latest exhibition of Old Master drawings at Christ Church Picture Gallery. And it makes it all the more interesting when there’s also a show of the artist’s own works on in the gallery at the same time.

Oxford-based artist and engraver Jeff Clarke has shown at Christ Church before. Now, for An Artist looks at Old Masters (until September 18), he selects more than 30 Old Master drawings — works by Correggio, Carracci, Dürer, Pisanello among them — from the 2,000 in the collection bequeathed by General John Guise to his former college in the mid-18th century.

His choices exemplify universal characteristics of art (he explains more on the picture labels), and he emphasises that “background scholarship, dates and so on gives way to a very personal focus”.

Of his own work, Clarke has 31 paintings, drawings and prints displayed (for sale), focussing on the urban landscape around and within his Oxford studio. It’s plain to see the importance of light and shade to him, as well as strength of line — instance his black ink and pastel Silo Barns Cuddesdon (above). Many are variations, at different times of day, or slightly altered compositionally as though working towards a solution.

When working towards their solutions, the Old Masters did the very drawings on show here. As Jacqueline Thalmann, the Picture Gallery’s curator points out these drawings were not made for display; they were ‘searches’ towards a finished work, and would have been put in a drawer and never seen.

Fittingly for a printmaker’s choice, there are three Dürers out including one of his master prints. The glorious copperplate engraving, Knight, Death and Devil (1513), is alone worth going to the exhibition for. There’s barely a section not worked in exquisite detail. The variations Dürer achieves, for instance, between horse’s coat, gleaming and healthy, dog running beneath its legs, rangy and long-haired, and Death’s sickly nag with lowered head, are astonishing.

Holbein’s study of heads and hands (above) is beautifully executed. Clarke calls it “a classic example of a sketchbook page, building up a library of ideas for use in portrait or figure compositions”.