Bloodlines: Circulating the Male Body Across Borders in Art and Anatomy 1780–1860

Abstract

Art and anatomy in the nineteenth century were intimately linked male-dominated professions, where hand and eye united. These activities were key interconnected sites of male bonding, of growing professional identity formation, and of the construction of modern masculinity. For the Irish-born Maclise brothers, Daniel and Joseph, the bonds were also fraternal: brothers living and working together in London throughout their lives with a shared passion for life drawing, anatomy, and the human figure in pictorial representation. Dissecting, in particular, the lithographic drawings of surgeon-artist Joseph Maclise (1815–1880) in Richard Quain’s The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (1840–circa 1844) and his own Surgical Anatomy (1851, 1856, and 1859), this essay tracks the lifeblood of the anatomical arts circulating around the networks of specialists with whom Maclise was associated, from Cork and the capitals of Scotland, England, and France, across the Atlantic to Philadelphia and Boston. At a time when travel was far slower, surgeons, artists, and printmakers travelled long distances in search of greater learning, the flow returning to generate new knowledges in its places of origin. Like the Grand Tour, these journeys often lasted far longer than a passing tourist visit, at times entailing months or years of professional study and work—as in Joseph Maclise’s anatomy studies in Paris. The anatomical work, and its representation in images and texts, was thereby circulating in shared ideas, practices, teaching, books, manuals, atlases, art, and crucially, given that the (primarily) white male body was the “universal” body in medical anatomy, in shared ways of seeing and constituting the human (male) body.