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Just one image here--a conglomerate made from individual works from my sketchbook. These were mostly done concurrently with my watercolor class. I missed figure drawing, as you can tell... And working from a live model is great, but there are some things you just can't get that way. For example, many of these poses are taken from books of dance photography. You can't have someone pose mid-backflip for 5 minutes to give you time to do a good sketch of it. More relevantly to the title of this post, the rest of these are copied from the sketchbooks of famous artists: Millet, Degas, Daumier, Rembrandt... and probably others. (I just realized those are all men. Shame on me for not checking out a collection of Morisot sketches. Or shame on the library for not having one when I looked, I don't remember.) In my sketchbook it was a little more organized, but I arranged them here more for design than for convenience. If you really know your stuff you can probably identify some of the artists anyway--ballet dancers are probably Degas if they're not from photographs; laborers are probably Millet.
But anyway, most of that paragraph is a tangent. What you can get from copying work from the masters that you can't get from drawing live is a look into how they see the world. I know (more or less) what the human figure looks like, and I know how I would draw it. But how would Rembrandt draw it? What does he notice that I don't? What does he leave out that include? What is important to him? How does Daumier manage to make his stuff look so serious and so cartoony at the same time? Then I can take what I've learned and implement it in my future drawings.
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Copying the masters is pretty common-sense stuff, and almost all artists do it. But what I see neglected all too often among my casual artist friends (and possibly even some professionals too) is learning about the masters--as people. Sure, I can look at a famous painting and identify whether I like it, whether it fits my style, etc. But do I know why the artist painted it that way? What if it sends a political message I don't like? For example, Gerome has some pretty beautiful paintings that reinforced some questionable ideas about exoticizing and othering the Middle East, ownership of women's bodies, etc. Bouguereau, meanwhile, is considered an icon of naturalistic ("it looks real!" for those of you not familiar with the lingo) painting, but his stuff is also kind of inane and male gaze-y, and that whole school of art at the time was in direct opposition to most of the really creative and innovative art that was being produced. Interestingly enough, the "rabble-rousers" I'm speaking of are now so "mainstream" that it's a cliche to like them--the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists: Monet, Van Gogh, Morisot, Cassatt, Cezanne, and others. (One of my pet peeves is people who dismiss Impressionism as being passe and pedestrian when it was completely revolutionary at the time--although some people criticize them for not being political enough. I have mixed feelings about that kind of criticism.)
What does this all mean? It means that when you are drawing stylistic choices from a variety of sources without learning anything about why the original artists did what they did, the final product may end up being the artistic equivalent of accidentally saying something obscene in a foreign language when you are trying to ask for directions. Imagine you came across this poster without any sort of context at all. You might think, "Hey, I like families, and I like eagles. America, amirite?" You decide to copy it in your sketchbook for practice, and BAM someone flips through your sketchbook and finds some Nazi propaganda. Okay, so it's an extreme example. More likely you reference Picasso's Guernica because it's famous and you know what it is and the most you can say about it is "isn't cubism so weird?" And then you look like a goob because you've completely ignored the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War that the painting was meant to address. Or, on the flip side, you make Picasso your personal hero because he's so free-spirited and independent and revolutionary, and you have just made a hero out of someone who led a life of hyperbolic misogyny, brutalizing every woman who would let him get close enough.
By all means, copy the masters. But also know what their paintings meant in their own place and time, and build on it in your own context. Studying art history has not only given me a much more sophisticated vocabulary for discussing art, but it has helped me understand which tools I can use to express my own ideas in my own time--and actually say what I mean to say.
Of course, all this studying has only had very limited results so far, as I am a complete amateur and have yet to apply the same dedication to understanding the politics and dynamics of the art world today. So take my advice with a grain of salt. I'm working on it, okay?