19 Chest and Upper Limb

Title: Chest and Upper Limb

Artist/ Source: Joseph Lister (1827-1912)

Date: 1850

Medium/ Technique: Black, red and blue chalk

UCL Art Museum #4798

 

Veins are shown in blue and arteries in red. The quality of line appears more spontaneous and suggests a greater rapidity of drawing in relation to previous works. Lines trail off, chalk is smudged, and the careful aesthetic attention paid to “Side of Neck and Floor of the Mouth” is absent. The key is also written with less attention than in “Dorsum and the Forearm of the Thumb”, clearly without the use of a guide as Lister’s handwritten labels variously slant upwards and downwards.

The Lister references the presence of the skin fayed off the figure, laying beneath the dissected corpse to its left. Lister’s drawings are variously closed by definitive contours and left open, as if bleeding on the table from their orifices. A few short red lines remind the viewer of the penetration of arteries throughout the figure and thus the sanguine nature of the dissected body rendered sterile by the act of drawing.

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