There are three letters from Michael Ayrton to Ruth Borchard dated to the mid-1960s. In the second letter, he writes: 'I haven't been able to do a self- portrait especially for you, but I have found a tolerable pencil drawing which looks like me and is a respectable piece of work.’ This self-portrait is signed and dated '23.12.1961', and so was drawn just about a month before his forty-first birthday. At around this time, Ayrton was preoccupied with what he called 'The Nature of Drawing': ‘the great problem of drawing,' he wrote, 'is how to make a permanent distillation, in a single image, of something which in fact has changed all the time under your eyes.' Like so much of Ayrton's work, this stern yet quietly fretful self- portrait has a slightly self-dramatising air, but what is so admirable here is how dispassionately the artist appears to be able to look at, and evoke, this particular trait in himself.