Dessein ..
This is an eighteenth-century French drawing instruction plate set titled Dessein, published in 1763 with no named publisher and attributed to Charles-Ange Boily, probably made for students learning to draw the human figure. The engraved plates show male nude figures in standing poses, with the anatomy of muscles, limbs, ears, noses and feet rendered in fine hatched line and some plates annotated with lettered reference marks. A designer could take from them the clarity of contour hatching and the way figures are built up from simplified anatomical structure.
