The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp entrance fee. The spectators are appropriately dressed for this social occasion. It is thought that the uppermost (not holding the paper) and farthest left figures were added to the picture later. Every five to ten years, the Surgeon's Guild would commission a portrait by a leading portraitist of the period; Rembrandt was commissioned for this task when he was 26 years old, and newly arrived in Amsterdam. It was his first major commission in Amsterdam. Each of the men included in the portrait would have paid a certain amount of money to be included in the work, and the more
The Anatomy Lesson (Morley novel) dead-on portrait of inept parents and aimless youth,” concluded Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist. “Blackly funny,” wrote Alex Clark in "The Observer", “but breathtakingly bleak.” “John David Morley is known to European and American literary connoisseurs as a writer who merits serious attention”, Bettina Drew wrote in "The Washington Post", before hailing the author's latest work as “a serious meditation on despair and loss and our inability to really know the people we love.” After "Pictures from the Water Trade" in 1985 and "The Feast of Fools" in 1994, "The Anatomy Lesson" became the third of Morley's novels to be designated