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William Hogarth, British painter, printmaker, satirist, and moralist, gained widespread popularity in his time for his illustrated social commentaries. In large format detailed prints, beautifully executed and progressing in sequential order, Hogarth told moralizing tales. Enlivened by brutal details, they directly spoke to people’s imagination.
His stories served as morality lessons to all—from the misfortune that arose from drinking gin as opposed to beer in Gin Lane and Beer Street, to the pitfalls of the life of harlots in Harlot’s Progress. In The Four Stages of Cruelty, Tom Nero is portrayed as a young lad in Stage 1 of the printed series. Tom’s early start in torturing animals progresses to murder and ultimately leads to his demise.
This particular morality tale consisted of four separate plates, demonstrating in gruesome detail the general progression and outcome of degenerative behavior, a message which had been advanced by various philosophers of the time. In John Locke’s educational text of 1693, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he expresses deep concern regarding the consequences of childrens’ torture of animals:
The tendency to cruelty should be watched in children and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing other animals will, by degrees, harden their hearts even toward man. Children should from the beginning be brought up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting living beings.
While children have always been a popular subject in art, individualized representations of children only became common with the rise of 17th-century Northern European portraiture. In antiquity children generally appeared in the guise of genii, a kind of spirit-creature.
Images of winged children date back to the classical world, but they took on a more pronounced role in the arts of the Renaissance. Among the Italians, the Florentine sculptor Donatello (c. 1386 - 1466) led the way in portraying these winged children as active figures rather than as merely ornamental elements. Paradoxically, these pudgy, winged toddlers fluttered into both pious Christian and lewd pagan scenes. They are variously referred to as putti, cupids, cherubs, and genii. Not yet possessing the persona of a full-grown adult, they embody the essence or spirit of life.
The putto is at that enchanting age of childhood that is still innocent and without guile, when the consciousness of right and wrong still slumbers even as unconsciously his growing strength and independence already stir impulses that arouses the mischieval imp within him.
Wilhelm Bode, 1921
HKDV
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Engraving Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1923.7.37 |
