The Child’s Skeleton

A small skeleton waving from a hillside.

Work: from Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones
Maker: William Cheselden
Date: 1733
Held by: Published London, 1733 · Wellcome Collection

Osteographia · Tab. XXXII

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Plate XXXII of William Cheselden's Osteographia, London, 1733: the skeleton of a child standing on a rise of ground with one arm lifted, a hill town and its ruins in the distance. The Wellcome Collection records this impression as unlettered, printed before the key numbers were added. Cheselden was a London surgeon who drew his bones from the specimen with a camera obscura and then posed them with a painter's sense of occasion. The small figure is the gentlest plate in a book of grave ones.

See it on your wall

The plate, in the room it was made for

The Child’s Skeleton, printed large and framed — in the consulting room, the study, the library. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A reproduction of from Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones — William Cheselden, 1733 — from the copy held by Published London, 1733 · Wellcome Collection. The source. The work is centuries out of copyright and in the public domain.
Printed faithful to that source scan. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the plate you receive is the plate as it survives.
Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm. Framed editions sit in a box frame under acrylic, with no mount.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the engraver’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days.
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the engraver’s hand is visible — the linework, the tonal work, the lettering — on a matte sheet that shows every line without glare.

From the same hand