In Philip Pearlstein’s Female Model on a Ladder, a painting in his current retrospective recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum,¹ there is an especially intriguing hand: it is intriguing because its owner has no face. The upper edge of the canvas crops the model’s body at the collar bones, so the hand, answering mimetically to the purpose usually served by a face, becomes the focus of interest. The hand is resting palm down against its owner’s thigh, supporting a certain amount of weight; it is a well-formed female hand with long tapering fingers and unpainted nails. At the wrist the styloid processes of the radius and the ulna markedly protrude; so do the so-called “saddle-joint” of the thumb, which is visibly cleft, and the head of the metacarpal, where the thumb bends. Like most women’s hands this one is not very muscular, but it is vividly veined—a reminder that it is fed by a heart. And in fact both the basilic and cephalic veins of the forearm, which return blood to the heart, are easily discernible. The net of veins on the hand itself, which conspicuously shows the dorsal venous arch, seems unusually distended, as it is, say, in the hands of steamfitters and longshoremen; but the dorsal muscle of the thumb, the interosseous, is not especially developed, as it would be in any sort of manual worker. Of course other things than toil could have caused this venous prominence, such as prolonged athletic exertion, frequent