John Bathe (1849-1874)
Anatomical Study: Human Musculature, in Contrapposto
Pencil and wash; signed; individual muscles are numbered with their names listed in Latin to the left hand side
28 x 19 ½ inches
£3,000
Provenance
By descent from the family of the artist
An ecorche study by 21-year-old John Bathe, done in 1870 for studentship at the Royal Academy. He and his fellow students would have been taught that ‘anatomy is one of the great elementary principles of the art of design’, modelling their studies on the Academy’s plaster casts after ‘Phidias, Agasias, Gilcon … The artist cannot study the figures of the antique too frequently’ (JB Sharpe, Elements of Anatomy, 1818, p 7).