What three words did Allan Cunningham use to describe The Four States of Cruelty?
Hogarth was pleased with the results. European Magazine reported that he commented to a bookseller from Cornhill (a Mr. Sewell):
there is no part of my works of which I am so proud, and in which I now feel so happy, as in the series of The Four Stages of Cruelty because I believe the publication of theme has checked the diabolical spirit of barbarity to the brute creation which, I am sorry to say, was once so prevalent in this country.
In his unfinished Apology for Painters he commented further:
I had rather, if cruelty has been prevented by the four prints, be the maker of them than the [Raphael] cartoons, unless I lived in a Roman Catholic country.
In his 1817 book Shakespeare and His Times, Nathan Drake credits the representation of "throwing at cocks" in the first plate for changing public opinion about the practice, which was common at the time, and prompting magistrates to take a harder line on offenders. In his "Lectures on Ethics" Immanuel Kant refers to the engravings as an example of how cruelty towards animals leads indirectly to failing duties towards humans as Hogarth "brings home to us the terrible rewards of cruelty, and this should be an impressive lesson to children."
Others found the series less to their liking. Charles Lamb dismissed the series as mere caricature, not worthy to be included alongside Hogarth's other work, but rather something produced as the result of a "wayward humour" outside of his normal habits. Art historian Allan Cunningham also had strong feelings about the series:
I wish it had never been painted. There is indeed great skill in the grouping, and profound knowledge of character; but the whole effect is gross, brutal and revolting. A savage boy grows into a savage man, and concludes a career of cruelty and outrage by an atrocious murder, for which he is hanged and dissected.
The Anatomy Act 1832 ended the dissection of murderers, and most of the animal tortures depicted were outlawed by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, so by the 1850s The Four Stages of Cruelty had come to be viewed as a somewhat historical series, though still one with the power to shock, a power it retains for a modern audience.
gross brutal revolting