Face recognition is challenging especially when the images from different persons are similar to each other due to variations in illumination, expression, and occlusion. If we have sufficient training images of each person which can span the facial variations of that person under testing conditions, sparse representation based classification (SRC) achieves very promising results. However, in many applications, face recognition often encounters the small sample size problem arising from the small number of available training images for each person. In this paper, we present a novel face recognition framework by utilizing low-rank and sparse error matrix decomposition, and sparse coding techniques (LRSE+SC). Firstly, the low-rank matrix recovery technique is applied to decompose the face images per class into a low-rank matrix and a sparse error matrix. The low-rank matrix of each individual is a class-specific dictionary and it captures the discriminative feature of this individual. The sparse error matrix represents the intra-class variations, such as illumination, expression changes. Secondly, we combine the low-rank part (representative basis) of each person into a supervised dictionary and integrate all the sparse error matrix of each individual into a within-individual variant dictionary which can be applied to represent the possible variations between the testing and training images. Then these two dictionaries are used to code the query image. The within-individual variant dictionary can be shared by all the subjects and only contribute to explain the lighting conditions, expressions, and occlusions of the query image rather than discrimination. At last, a reconstruction-based scheme is adopted for face recognition. Since the within-individual dictionary is introduced, LRSE+SC can handle the problem of the corrupted training data and the situation that not all subjects have enough samples for training. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results on AR, FERET, FRGC and LFW databases.