Study of Feet

This anatomical study by Francis Augustus Lathrop demonstrates the careful draftsmanship underlying late-nineteenth-century illustration. Three detailed renderings of feet from different angles reveal the artist's methodical approach to human form—essential training for commercial illustrators of the period. Lathrop's precise pen work and hatching technique exemplify the technical foundation that newspaper illustrators and emerging comic strip artists required. Such studies from life or plaster casts were standard practice in the 1890s, when the newspaper industry was beginning to develop sequential narrative art that would eventually define the comic strip medium.