Condition report from the gallery.
The fresh, unaltered surfaces of the sheets are rare. Gautier-Dagoty's plates were often varnished in order to preserve them as teaching aids. Thus altered, the subtlety of Gautier-Dagoty's color printing technique and thus the affective power of these remarkable images were seriously diminished. Even if the suite must have been published in editions of some size, the degree to which they were studied as curiosities and anatomical texts meant that the individual plates often suffered.
About Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty.
Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty, the founder of a family of French printmakers that bears his name, came to Paris in 1736 where he produced his first print in colors using three plates. By superimposing the three plates each inked in a different color, he was able to create a reasonably convincing color image. In 1738 he entered the shop of Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667-1771) where he learned the technique of adding a fourth plate in order to give light-dark values to the images.
Gautier-Dagoty's earliest prints were after paintings; by the mid-1740s he began to create a series of anatomical studies. While his printing quality can be uneven in the earlier images, his anatomical studies are always brilliant and arresting. The use of color and his bold compositions gave, perhaps for the first time in the history of anatomical imagery, a sense of the human body as encompassing the contradictions between human and machine, between traditional ideals of beauty and the investigation of the structures hidden beneath skin and sinews.
To this point it is interesting to note that "Man seen from the Rear..." employs the device of the figure kneeling on a cloth covered bench, in the manner of male and female academy figures recorded by artists and students as part of their artistic training. The artist thus presents the figure in the paradoxical condition of having been dissected and thus a corpse while simultaneously alive and in command of his limbs. While these remarkable color engravings were, until the advent of photography, a principal means of explicating anatomy for medical students, they also defined the human body as a complex structure to be admired for its elegance and beauty.