Pleasure and Violence: Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty

29 April 2021
3:00 pm
This is the fourth lecture in the seven-part series titled, Artist in Focus: William Hogarth.
Online

Hogarth soon followed Industry and Idleness with another, even more, popular series, The Four Stages of Cruelty. A tale of poverty, crime, and punishment, The Stages of Cruelty is, in many ways, Hogarth’s most searing piece of social critique. But it is also most powerfully an expression of his deep and enduring faith in the power of art to change society for the better. In this lecture, Meredith Gamer considers how the Cruelty series works, at once, to expose and repair the harm that humans do.

This lecture will be pre-recorded and will go live on our recordings page and our youtube channel at 3 pm GMT on 29 April 2021.

About the speaker

Meredith Gamer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specializes in the art and visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Britain and the British Atlantic world. Her current book project, The Sheriff’s Picture Frame: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain, examines the relationship between the visual arts and the spectacle of capital punishment in Hogarth’s London and beyond.