William Cowper

The drawing was formerly classified under anonymous Italian, seventeenth century, having been associated with that school at least since its acquisition in 1970 by Joseph McCrindle, according to an invoice preserved among the McCrindle papers in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. In 2019, however, Monique Kornell convincingly reassigned the work to William Cowper, the English anatomist and surgeon. As Kornell showed, Cowper made the study in preparation for the etched illustrations in his anatomical treatise 'Myotomia reformata', which first appeared in London in 1694, with an expanded edition published posthumously in 1724. Specifically, the Morgan study prepared Table VII, which features an elaborated version of the drawing with the addition of numbers labelling the exposed muscles, a more extensive landscape setting, and another seated figure that balances the composition and offers a third view of the muscles of the back. In the book's preface, Cowper described making the drawings directly from dissections. Though Cowper produced many of the corresponding etchings himself, the Antwerp-born printmaker Michael Vandergucht (1606-1725) was also responsible for etching some of the plates, following Cowper's drawings. Vandergucht had initially signed his contributions, though his signature was later erased, or partially erased, from several plates, making it difficult to assign many of the etchings to either artist, as is the case with Table VII.
Related drawings by Cowper are now in the University of Glasgow Library and British Library, London. The Glasgow drawings are preserved in a bound volume containing individual studies of both figures in the Morgan drawing and all three figures destined for the final etching, as Kornell observed.