A staple of art instruction, this book is the most concise and accessible guide to accurately depicting the human body. Its illustrations and cross-sections offer examples of human skeletal and muscular substructures and details of individual body parts, helping students achieve the most precise visual recreation of human form and motion.

Subjects include the skeleton, the coverings and regions of the body, the upper and lower extremities, movements of the joints, the trunk, and the head and neck. Additional topics encompass expression and gesture, differences of size and proportion in the sexes, and growth, development, and measurements. More than 130 detailed figures appear throughout the text, in addition to thirty-one plates.

The object of this book is to give the shortest description of human anatomy compatible with the interests of the artist and essential for their work, and to burden their mind as little as possible with names, with technicalities, and with those details which do not bear directly upon the surface forms. It is, unfortunately, impossible to save the art student from the difficulties of the nomenclature employed in anatomy. Attempts made from time to time to simplify it have been found to impair the accuracy and clearness of the necessary descriptions, and have by common consent of teachers been abandoned.