B173721
System control number
9411
Shelfmark
7.1 MAC O/S
Author
Maclise, J.
Title
Surgical Anatomy
Edition
[1st]
Publication, distribution, etc.
London: John Churchill, 1851
Physical description
(10), (35 Pl., 70 pp. text), (4), 55 cm
Biographical or historical data
Joseph Maclise was a rare artist in Britain to adopt the ‘Continental’ style of illustration seen in Parisian anatomical atlases. This is perhaps unsurprising given the years he spent in Paris in the 1830s and 40s honing his craft.
Under the guidance of Pierre Nicolas Gerdy, he had access to countless cadavers to model for him in the morgue of La Pitié, but he also learnt from Gerdy the value of drawing from life. While early anatomical illustrations brought dead bodies to theatrical life, Maclise made beautiful corpses of finely observed living portraits.
Maclise left no letters or diaries, never married or had children. His private and interior life can only be witnessed in his work. That work returned frequently to a favoured motif: artfully posed, technically accomplished, and lovingly detailed images of handsome young naked men. Intentionally or not, Maclise’s illustrations signalled that anatomical art was a space in which men could explore their desires for the bodies of other men.
Where Maclise’s contemporaries covered parts of the male anatomy with a modesty sheet, Maclise let it all show. In his book Queer Anatomies, historian Michael Sappol highlighted the way Maclise’s art developed a frisson of eroticism from lavishing attention on “irrelevant” details beyond the purported purpose of the illustration.
The scar on the thigh. The pierced ear. These diligently rendered extraneous details in Maclise's illustration of the principal blood vessels of the thorax and abdomen indicate a portrait of a real individual. His is perhaps the only Black body in any Victorian anatomical atlas. The illustration was removed from the book’s US edition, the American audience judged unready for Black and white bodies placed on an equal footing.
Maclise, a tanner’s son, would have been acutely aware of his status relative to his London mentor Richard Quain. Like Maclise, Quain was a native of County Cork, Ireland, but was born of minor gentry. Richard Quain’s successor as Professor of Anatomy at the University of London was not Maclise but the more affluent George Viner Ellis. Ellis - and his artist George Henry Ford - shared Maclise’s appreciation of aesthetics, but without the more overt homoeroticism and exposed, detailed male genitalia that characterises Maclise’s work.
Under the guidance of Pierre Nicolas Gerdy, he had access to countless cadavers to model for him in the morgue of La Pitié, but he also learnt from Gerdy the value of drawing from life. While early anatomical illustrations brought dead bodies to theatrical life, Maclise made beautiful corpses of finely observed living portraits.
Maclise left no letters or diaries, never married or had children. His private and interior life can only be witnessed in his work. That work returned frequently to a favoured motif: artfully posed, technically accomplished, and lovingly detailed images of handsome young naked men. Intentionally or not, Maclise’s illustrations signalled that anatomical art was a space in which men could explore their desires for the bodies of other men.
Where Maclise’s contemporaries covered parts of the male anatomy with a modesty sheet, Maclise let it all show. In his book Queer Anatomies, historian Michael Sappol highlighted the way Maclise’s art developed a frisson of eroticism from lavishing attention on “irrelevant” details beyond the purported purpose of the illustration.
The scar on the thigh. The pierced ear. These diligently rendered extraneous details in Maclise's illustration of the principal blood vessels of the thorax and abdomen indicate a portrait of a real individual. His is perhaps the only Black body in any Victorian anatomical atlas. The illustration was removed from the book’s US edition, the American audience judged unready for Black and white bodies placed on an equal footing.
Maclise, a tanner’s son, would have been acutely aware of his status relative to his London mentor Richard Quain. Like Maclise, Quain was a native of County Cork, Ireland, but was born of minor gentry. Richard Quain’s successor as Professor of Anatomy at the University of London was not Maclise but the more affluent George Viner Ellis. Ellis - and his artist George Henry Ford - shared Maclise’s appreciation of aesthetics, but without the more overt homoeroticism and exposed, detailed male genitalia that characterises Maclise’s work.
Subject
SURGERY ANATOMY (Categories)
B173721
UKLeTMM
20260623160159.0