Traddles displaying a slate with a skeleton drawing. From an advertising card for a cigarette manufacturer.
The most celebrated child artist of the skeleton must be Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield’s fellow pupil at Salem House. Or would be if any of his slate drawings had survived…
Poor Traddles!…He was always being caned—I think he was caned every day that half year….After laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his slate before his eyes were dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons, and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality that caning couldn’t last forever. But I believe he only did it because they were easy and didn’t require any features (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 7).
We may have none of Traddles’ art, but there are a respectable number of boys’ and girls’ drawings of skeletons in the manuscript versions of the religious turn-up book, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man. (There’s more information about this fascinating illustrated text at the Learning as Play site). The subject of the final metamorphic picture is a rich and worldly young man, who, when the flaps are lifted, transforms into Death, always represented as a skeleton, usually holding an hourglass and scythe, sometimes with a coffin in the background. The manuscript turn-ups are actually more common than the printed ones, whose heyday was between 1660 and the early 1800s. However, the anonymous manuscripts are harder to localize, even when signed by their makers. English or American? 18 or 19th century?
Here is a gallery of skeletons from Cotsen’s rather large collection of the manuscript turn-up books. No two are the same and none are even remotely anatomically correct. Maybe the differences reveal something about the extent of the individual artist’s knowledge of the human body, in addition to the level of skill with pen and watercolor wash.
Perhaps Eleanor Schank was quite young in 1776 when she scratched out the drawings for this turn-up. The figure’s costume is unmistakably feminine. It’s the only one in the collection where a young woman is substituted for the man. The skeleton seems to have given her more trouble (Cotsen in process).
The anonymous artist of this nicely colored one emphasized the joints at the expense of the rib cage. The floral frames around the verse are a dainty touch (Cotsen 5145).
This creator of this unsigned manuscript produced a substantial man in blue breeches holding money bags and the pleasingly abstract skeleton with bow legs. The Adam and Eve were given belly buttons (Cotsen 23624).
John Sutton drew this well dressed young man in a tricorne and a better than average skeleton–one of the few with a pelvic girdle (Cotsen 3135). 
The drawings in this, the last example, has dash and energy, along with major problems with the perspective. The skeleton’s face looks a little too friendly.
Children continue to be fascinated by making skeletons. One father/blogger has immortalized his three-year-old son’s obsession in at least three posts. He sounds as if he could give Tommy Traddles a run for his money filling up all available blank space with animated constructions of bones…
Drawing skeletons and other scary things
In the early 1890s, Beatrix Potter was chafing at her lack of independence and decided to try earning some money by selling drawings of anthropomorphized animals to publishers Ernest Nister or Hildesheimer & Faulkner, German-based firms known for high-quality color printing. She realized 7 shillings and 6 pence in 1892 from the sale of this highly finished drawing of Peter Rabbit opening the front door and discovering a large wicker basket filled with carrots and turnips (or perhaps rutabagas) on the snowy step. Signed “H. B. P.” in tiny initials in the lower right, it first appeared in a medley of pictures on the cover drawings on Nister’s Changing Pictures [1893] and as the frontispiece to Nister’s Isn’t It Funny [1894], both of which are in the collection. There is a preparatory sketch of this scene in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
May there be a surprise on your porch this Christmas morning!
