Almost the first things we encounter on entering the illuminating survey “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” at the Morgan Library & Museum are a couple of self-portraits done in 1954 by the precocious artist (born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1937) when he was a seventeen-year-old student.1A dark-haired boy stares us down through owlish glasses in an achingly sensitive pencil drawing, his hair combed forward in a thick fringe. A collage version translates the confrontational boy and his natty ensemble into primary colors: blue jacket, yellow tie, and red scarf, against a newsprint background that enters into a conversation with a checked shirt. Toward the end of the show, we find a self-portrait done in watercolor almost half a century later, in 2003. Hockney, his hair now gray, leans towards us as he draws a sinuous line with a brush on a sheet spread before him. He peers over his glasses, staring as intently as he did five decades earlier; red suspenders, yellow trousers, and bright blue eyes, set against a pale blue background, reprise the palette of the earlier image. Together, these works not only bracket the selection chronologically but also encapsulate the autobiographical, diaristic exhibition, signaling both the artist’s unwavering preoccupation with drawing throughout his long working life and his continual investigation of different methods and mediums. The early and late self-portraits are emblematic of the show’s overview of the constants and the variables of Hockney’s evolution from his student years to the present, through