Nicolaes Tulp attended by prominent learned men, who exchanged ideas about anatomy and the chemical processes of the human body. As befits a new praelector, the Guild commissioned a new group portrait of the prominent councilmen and guildmasters. Rembrandt, himself a young man of 26 and new to the city, won this commission and made a famous painting of him: "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp". This painting, which now hangs in the Mauritshuis museum of the Hague, depicts Tulp dissecting such a criminal's forearm. There has been much speculation as to why the dissection began on the forearm. Rembrandt's event
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