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 was meant by 'cruelty'.