Hogarth's Art of Animal Cruelty Satire, Suffering and Pictorial Propaganda

William Hogarth, one of England's foremost artists, made extensive use of animal images - as hybrids, edibles, companions, emblems of satire and objects of cruelty. Hogarth's Art of Animal Cruelty: Satire, Suffering and Pictorial Propaganda offers an important examination of Hogarth's intentions in the Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), a series of four prints generally neglected by art historians and wrongly identified by legal historians and other scholars as a milestone in the development of animal rights. In this book, Beirne analyses how Hogarth's various audiences would have reacted to his gruesome images, and ultimately what they and he likely understood by the term 'cruelty'.

Piers Beirne is Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of Inventing Criminology (1993) and Confronting Animal Abuse (2009) and the recipient of several awards and fellowships in England, Ireland and the United States. He is the founding co-editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology.

1. Introduction

2. Seeing Hogarth's Animal Images

3. Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty

4. After Hogarth