U.S. National Library oh Health, Bethesda
Illustration from Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie, dessiné d’après nature … pour l’utilit des sciences et des arts (A New Collection of Bones and Muscles, Drawn from Life… for the Use of Sciences and the Arts) by Jacques Gamelin (1738-1803).
Toulouse: De l'imprimerie de J. F. Desclassan, 1779
In 1777, Gamelin’s father died and he returned to Toulouse. Using his inheritance, Gamelin began work on the most important project of his career Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie. With the assistance of local magistrates, Gamelin was given access to the corpses of executed criminals, which he both dissected and sketched. Then, he hired two engravers, Jacques Lavallée (active 1790-1830) and an artist known only as Martin, to assist him in converting these drawings to prints. After two years, Gamelin released his masterpiece in an edition of 200 copies, priced at forty livres each (nine livre may be the cost to dress a man at that period). The book did not sell and Gamelin went bankrupt. Most of the unsold copies were either pulped or dismembered, accounting for the book’s exceptional rarity.
The atlas is a mixture of imaginative artistic life-studies and technical anatomical drawings. The first part is devoted to bones and the second part to muscles. Allegorical scenes of death, battle, and genre scenes appear throughout.
Source 1
Source 2