Taken from Life: Hunter, Rymsdyck, and the Anatomical Portrait

In 1774, the physician William Hunter published his magnum opus, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures. The plates of Hunter’s book, which he produced in close collaboration with the artist Jan van Rymsdyck, are widely regarded as masterworks of anatomical illustration, esteemed for their precision, accuracy, and painstaking attention to detail. Hunter himself encouraged this view: in the Anatomy’s Preface, he assures readers that every “object” pictured therein “is represented exactly as it was seen.” Both formally and rhetorically, then, the Anatomy presents itself as a work of pure empiricism—and, to date, most discussions of it have engaged with it on these terms.

This paper takes a different tack. Focusing on the most famous of the Anatomy’s plates (Figure 1), it traces the history of this print back to the moment of its inception, in 1750, when Hunter dissected the body it shows, and when Rymsdyck made the preparatory drawing on which it is based (Figure 2). Through a combination of close visual analysis and equally close attention to Hunter’s own unpublished writings, I argue that this drawing and others Rymsdyck made around the same time (Figure 3) raise a host of complex questions about the nature and value of life; our connections to one another; and the relationship between art and death. Ultimately, I suggest that these works shed new light on a key genre of British art that was also closely bound up with matters of mimesis and truth: the portrait.