Face down on the slab

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
An écorché figure (life-size), lying prone on a table: the right arm hangs down below the table. Red chalk and pencil drawing, with bodycolour, by C. Landseer, 1813 (?).
1813 By: Charles Landseer
Size: sheet 54.5 x 75.2 cm.
Collection: Iconographic Collections
Library reference no.: Iconographic Collection 583992i
Full Bibliographic Record Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

1813! Our corpse is likely to be a hanged man, although nothing disturbs the elegance of that nape. This is one of the choice exhibits in the Wellcome Collection's "Skin" exhibition, and I was pleased today to see the actual drawing which I have long admired in reproduction.

The red chalk is added after the pose has been laid in lightly in black chalk , which is how the muscle fibres are so confident, so taut. The pose, its back to the sky, is quadrupedal and reminds one of the gleaming racehorses and greyhounds of Charles's more famous brother. The red flanks are groomed like a pelt, visually edited to exclude the ooze , fat, vessels and imperfections of a real dissection.

The strokes which describe the choppy hair and the shadows concealing the face are skilled and schooled - hours spent in the Academy rendering plaster busts and light on geometric solids have trained the life out of that part of the drawing. It's not the bit Charles is interested in; he's after the sleek organic mechanism, the life that's just been suspended, the abjection (face down on the slab!) which makes the handsome form all the more denuded, the hump in the spine that tells you the body's weight and pliability. The beastlike pose makes you wonder what this individual did not live to regret.