William Clift's Sketches of Executed Murderers

Abstract

William Clift (1775–1849) was John Hunter's last assistant and six years after Hunter's death he became the first conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It was the conservator's duty to anatomise murderers who had been sentenced to death and dissection. Clift dutifully fulfilled his role and recorded any medically noteworthy features of the bodies. But he did something quite out of the ordinary and singular when he drew careful and sensitively observed portraits of the freshly executed criminals. The drawings are captivating because of the way in which they occupy a representational space that does not fit within medical illustration, artistic portraiture, social documentary or any other conventional category. This paper explores the characteristics that the sketches have as representations and discusses the reasons that might have been behind their creation.

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