Art Institute of Chicago

The Reward of Cruelty

John Bell (English, 1721–1780)

Date

1750

Medium

Woodcut in black on ivory laid paper

Culture

England

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

In the conclusion to the print series Four Stages of Cruelty , the corpse of the murderer Tom Nero is dissected in an anatomy theater. At this time the bodies of criminals were the main source of cadavers; here Hogarth pointedly left the hangman’s noose around Nero’s neck. The dog gnawing on an discarded organ, possibly the heart, refers to the character’s unseemly torture of a dog in the first print of the series.Hogarth commissioned this work and Cruelty in Perfection in a rare foray into the woodcut medium, but abandoned the experiment after only two prints; he published the complete series as smaller engravings a year later.

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