Tonks Illustration

Whilst official artist for Harold Gillies, Tonks produced many illustrations, as well as his iconic pastels, both to facilitate patient records and diagrams for textbooks.

He worked mainly in other media, usually pencil.  A tall, “hawk-like” figure, he stood unobtrusively in theatre, quietly drawing whilst Gillies and his teams pieced injured servicemen’s faces back together. A knowledge of anatomy, gained during his own surgical training, informed his works. They were produced not only to record what had been done, in the previous steps of multi-staged procedures, but to act as a training resource. In this rapidly advancing new branch of surgery, many of the procedures were being undertaken for the first time, and some were not successful.

Later Tonks was to provide both diagrams and some of his pastels for Gillies’ textbook “Plastic Surgery Of The Face” in 1920. Gillies notes in the preface that “the foundation of the graphic methods of recording these cases lies to the credit of Professor H Tonks”.