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 (Roth novel) of writing autobiographical novels," adding, "no modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally." In "The New Yorker", John Updike was more complimentary finding, "The postmodernist writer's bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway...Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention, "The Anatomy Lesson" seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent." The first and second books in the Zuckerman trilogy are 1979's "The Ghost Writer" and 1981's "Zuckerman Unbound". The