City of the Gallows

The macabre, interwoven histories of art and punishment in eighteenth-century London
 
Over the course of the eighteenth century, the visual arts in Britain flourished as never before. The nation’s first art academies were founded; its first exhibitions of contemporary art were staged; and a vastly expanded public for the arts began to form. This book demonstrates that these developments were intimately linked to another, darker kind of art: the spectacle of capital punishment. Between 1680 and 1820, the number of crimes punishable by death under British law rose dramatically – from roughly fifty to more than two hundred – and at Tyburn, London’s main execution ground, dozens of people were hanged each year before thousands of spectators.

City of the Gallows uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.