Among the nearly eight hundred drawings by Barton that reside at UCLA, this self-portrait stands out for its naturalistic style. Like the rest, however, it was collected by Henry Evans— an antiquarian book dealer, fine-art printer, publisher, and printmaker—between 1958 and 1962 and donated to the university in 1971. The inscription reads, “For Henry from Rick,” alluding to the close relationship between the artist and his patron.

Compared to the charcoal sketch nearby, this drawing, which is also a self-portrait of sorts, is far more typical of Barton’s style. It shows the artist signing his name backward on a café table; his regular habit of mirror writing may have stemmed from his admiration for Leonardo da Vinci, whose use of reverse handwriting is widely known. Using a consistently weighted line that borders at times on cartoonish, Barton captured the minutiae of his environment— the zipper on his jacket, a beer mug, a coffee cup, ashtrays, his cigarette pack and matches—from an unstable and shifting perspective.

Hands, which are notoriously difficult to draw, frequently appear in Barton’s work. This sketch, possibly made while the artist was incarcerated, examines a specific gesture from multiple angles. The composition underscores the expressive potential of hands, and its overlapping of red and blue lines suggests movement.

This drawing reveals Barton’s process of visual distillation. On the left side of a folded sheet, he copied a famous fifteenth-century portrait by the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, using rudimentary hatching and cross-hatching to model the figure. Barton fumbled the proportions, drawing the nose twice. By contrast, a pure contour drawing of the same subject—likely Van Eyck himself—on the right side of the sheet is far more confidently executed. Despite his economy of line, Barton conveyed the sitter’s intense gaze in a sketch so fluid it seems to have made itself, beginning at the collar and trailing off the page’s right edge.

The robed man with a walking stick in this drawing references a nineteenth-century woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, in which the influential Japanese artist represented himself as an older man. The agrarian setting, however, is borrowed from an engraving by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. Barton’s consistent line unifies these disparate sources in a cohesive composition.

Henry Evans opened the Porpoise Bookshop, shown here at its second location on Clement Street in San Francisco, in 1953. The store housed the Peregrine Press, which Evans had established four years earlier. From 1958 to 1963, he printed more than a dozen of Barton’s linocuts under the bookshop’s imprint, in editions of between 50 and 120.