Hogarth's Art of Animal Cruelty

Satire, Suffering and Pictorial Propaganda

P. Beirne

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137447203
• eBook ISBN: 9781137447210
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the animal images used in William Hogarth's art, demonstrating how animals were variously depicted as hybrids, edibles, companions, emblems of satire and objects of cruelty. Beirne offers an important assessment of how Hogarth's various audiences reacted to his gruesome images and ultimately what was meant by 'cruelty'.

1

Introduction

Abstract: It is well established that discursive innovations in literature and philosophy encouraged pro-animal sentiments in eighteenth-century England. Far less well known in this regard is the ‘animal turn’ in the graphic arts. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by documenting the extensive representation of animals in the paintings, drawings and printed engravings of the English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764). Its focus is The Four Stages of Cruelty, an extraordinary series of four prints executed and disseminated by Hogarth in early 1751.

Beirne, Piers. Hogarth’s Art of Animal Cruelty: Satire, Suffering and Pictorial Propaganda. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137447210.0004.

Over time and from one culture to another there is considerable variation in how animal abuse is perceived. One of the central tasks facing any social theory of animal abuse is to understand the emergence and development of human sentiments that are at once against cruelty and pro-animal. Compassion, respect, equality and rights all come prominently to mind in this regard.

This short book was prompted by my viewing of The Four Stages of Cruelty, a series of extraordinary printed engravings produced and circulated in early 1751 by the English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764). An instant sensation in its own time, The Four Stages has nowadays achieved canonical status in moral philosophy, in literary criticism and in the animal rights movement for drawing attention to the changing ways in which we humans inflict pain and suffering on nonhuman animals (henceforth, ‘animals’) – and in legal history and in sociological criminology as an influential milestone in the study of the link between childhood animal cruelty and subsequent violence between one human and another.

Hogarth’s much celebrated and sometimes maligned art sits plumb in the middle of the long eighteenth century (1780 to 1820, roughly).¹ This period is relatively uncharted territory in the study of animal abuse. If we look both before and after this period, then on its near side are the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle (1822) and soon thereafter the policing machinery of the Society (later, ‘Royal’) for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. On its far side are several discursive influences, among them, first, the advocacy of entrepreneurial efficiency by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century animal husbandry manuals; second, the pious pronouncements on animal care by the gentlemen of the mid-seventeenth-century Cromwellian Protectorate, whose Calvinist-inspired sermons dictated that, except on the Sabbath, we humans may use all the beasts of the earth for our own purposes – but only if we are kind to them, afford them shelter and have no public or rowdy sport with them; and third, an uneven but growing revulsion towards certain popular recreations, such as the running of bulls, cockfighting and the baiting of badgers, bulls, bears and dogs.²

Hogarth’s art veritably oozes with insight on those situations where power and misplaced authority intersect social inequality and countercultural resistance in eighteenth-century London. Into Hogarth’s work, including The Four Stages, there are numerous points of entry, the most convenient of which is his lived experience as an adolescent in a debtors’ prison. In this regard, during six of his youthful years Hogarth and his family were imprisoned in the precincts of the Fleet for his father’s inability to pay his debts.³

The effects of spending some of his formative years in the Fleet can be seen in many of Hogarth’s early works. These he embellished either as sets on the London stage or else as focused interiors in Newgate, Fleet and Bridewell prisons and in the Bedlam asylum. Two engraved benefit tickets from the 1720s are placed in or just outside a prison, for example (Hogarth, James Spiller, 1720; William Milward, 1728). The grim In the Madhouse (1735, A Rake’s Progress 8) represents confinement in the Bethlem (‘Bedlam’) asylum for the insane. A Just View of the British Stage (1724; and see The Prison, 1735, A Rake’s Progress 7) combines images of Drury Lane theatregoers with the performance of a farce set inside Newgate prison. The crowded Newgate scene has an escaping convict and also four nooses hanging from the rafters – one around the neck of the notorious thief Jack Sheppard, the other three awaiting the arrival of the next condemned. Indeed, completed fully 15 years after his release from the Fleet, Hogarth’s Committee of the House of Commons (1729) depicts the members of a parliamentary committee that had been appointed to examine the dreadful prison conditions in London, particularly those in the Fleet. Reflecting the committee’s findings of endemic corruption and the physical abuse of prisoners, Hogarth depicts the deliberations of 13 members of parliament held in a gloomy stone cell in the Fleet rather than in the more airy House of Commons, where it actually did meet. In this painting Hogarth focuses on the confrontation between Warden Thomas Bambridge and a prisoner. Evidently, the artist urges his audience to look at his picture and ask: Who are the real criminals?

Over the years, Hogarth arguably moved from a concern with confinement in institutional interiors to structurally similar social relationships in free society either in small rooms, salons and antechambers or else on streets and in other outdoor urban settings. However or wherever these social concerns were set, much of Hogarth’s art tended to portray the opening and closing of the Janus-faced doors through which constrained individuals episodically enter as victimisers and then leave as victims, and vice versa. Much of this revolving social process Hogarth couched not only in the vistas of carceral institutions and the faces of the condemned or the threat of the gallows but also in the convoluted images of the characters in his linked morality stories: the six scenes in each of A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and Marriage à la Mode (c. 1743), the eight in A Rake’s Progress (1735), the twelve in Industry and Idleness (1747) and the four in The Four Stages (1751).

An initial foray into the merits of The Four Stages quickly led me to see, however, that the reception of Hogarth’s famous prints lies somewhere between a cliché and an aesthetic wasteland, its apparent didactic message commonly viewed as: Catch and reform children who are cruel to animals before they become hard-hearted violent adults! For example, Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s principal biographer, notes that The Four Stages ‘illustrates a platitude: one must reap as one sows’⁴ and the literary historian Jenny Uglow condenses Tom Nero’s story into ‘[c]ruel boys become vicious men.’⁵ Similarly, in his magisterial Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas’ only comment on The Four Stages is that ‘[it] suggested that those who began by torturing cats and dogs would end by murdering their fellows.’⁶ Somewhat following Norbert Elias’ emphasis on the civilising process, Keith Tester recontextualises ‘Hogarth’s melodrama of Tom Nero’ as ‘a morality tale for a regulated society where the state has established a monopoly of the use of violence.’⁷

Among art historians the rough brush strokes and in-your-face images of The Four Stages have tended to arouse either disdain and dismissal or avoidance or a largely uncontested acceptance of the artist’s own brief and rather rambling comments on their production and dissemination.⁸ I wondered how much trust should be placed in Hogarth’s self-stated claim that The Four Stages ‘were done in hopes of preventing in some degree that cruel treatment of poor Animals’? What of the over numerous intentions almost always to be found in his art? Is it only animal cruelty that The Four Stages addresses? Perhaps there is something both too vague and not inquisitive enough, I reasoned, about the continued insertion of Hogarth’s complex picturing of cruelty into a trajectory with Pythagoras at one end and Margaret Mead and Mahatma Gandhi at the other. Perhaps one cannot properly spy Hogarth there.

Animals Galore!

A more nuanced reading of The Four Stages was abruptly deflected, however, by my unexpected discovery that this series of popular prints was not the only occasion on which Hogarth had chosen to depict animals. To the contrary, representations of animals appear in his art throughout the entire course of his career. Yet, despite the voluminous commentary on his creations and his recognition as one of England’s foremost artists, very little indeed has been noted about the pervasive representation of animals in Hogarth’s art.⁹

My awakening to the sheer pervasiveness of animals in Hogarth’s work has been at once surprising and invigorating. Undoubtedly, the number of my sightings of smaller quadrupeds such as cats and dogs is not an accurate accounting of their presence because that enumeration is quite difficult to be had. This is especially so when Hogarth has them hidden behind Georgian chaises longues or armchairs. So it is, too, when he positions them baked in pies or asleep in dark corners or else departed and at rest in family burial plots.

That said, however, a magnifying glass and an abacus are about all that is needed to document animals’ persistent appearance in Hogarth’s art. In one of his earliest works, the 12 engravings in the Hudibras series (1724–727), for example, not only at the margins of raucous crowd scenes but also at centre stage and in the course of violent confrontations of various sorts, there appear several horses, dogs and bears, an armadillo, a bat, a cat, a crocodile, a frog, a snake and a mounted swordfish. His very last creation, the cataclysmic Tailpiece: The Bathos (1764), projects the image of a dead Apollo – likely intended to represent the artist himself – recumbent in a carriage that is drawn through the heavens by three exhausted horses, one of whom seems already to have expired. This sad and grisly scene is illustrated with signboards such as ‘Finis’, ‘H. Nature Bankrupt’ and ‘The World’s End.’

Between the Hudibras series near the beginning of his career and The Bathos at the end – over the lengthy course of four decades, in other words – Hogarth painted, drew and engraved a wide range of animals: bears, dancing and fighting, muzzled and shackled or asleep; birds, both caged and not, including canaries, crows, doves, ducks, eagles, geese, owls, a parrot, ravens, seagulls, songbirds, swans and vultures; bulls; canids, including foxes, wolves and especially dogs – small, medium, large and coddled as pets and posed in portraiture and who fight, growl, sleep eat, and starve; cats and kittens; cattle, including those driven to and from market for sale and slaughter; chickens, chicks and cockerels (fighting and not); chimpanzees and monkeys; crustaceans; donkeys used as beasts of burden and as objects of cruelty; eels and other fishes, some swimming in rivers and streams and hunted by fishermen and still others, such as swordfishes, hung on walls as trophies; goats; hares; horses used in racing, for transport, in agriculture, and by the army (including one Trojan horse); insects, including beetles, butterflies, lice and moths; lions and cheetahs; pigs and piglets; rabbits, real and imagined; rodents, including rats and mice; sheep; shellfishes, especially oysters; and snakes.

To this lengthy list of animals depicted in Hogarth’s art and a handful of animated human skeletons must be added an astonishing array of part-animal/part-human hybrids. Among these are winged angels, centaurs, devils, dragons, elves, fairies, fauns, gargoyles, Gorgons, griffins, satyrs, sirens, sphinxes, troglodytes, unicorns and zephyrs. There are still other hybrid creatures in Hogarth’s art who resist or even defy identification but who resemble anthropomorphised foxes or hobgoblins.

Seeing through Hogarth’s animals

The trove of animals in Hogarth’s pictures cannot properly be appreciated simply by staring at them in earnest and somehow without prejudice. Without wishing to belabour the obvious, this is so because it is never animals, as such, whom we see in H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Seeing Hogarths Animal Images
• 3  Hogarths Four Stages of Cruelty: [T]o Reform Some Reigning Vices Peculiar to the Lower Class of People
• 4  After Hogarth
• Bibliography
• Index