The Four Stages of Cruelty - Notes

Notes

a. ^ A pair of impressions from Bell's original printing were acquired for £1600 by the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in 2005.

b. ^ There is some confusion over the date of George "The Barber" Taylor's career and death. In his earlier work Paulson puts him as a pupil of Broughton, killed in a fight with him in 1750, and the Tate Gallery dates Hogarth's sketches to c. 1750. In Hogarth's "Harlot", he states that Taylor retired in 1750 but came out of retirement in 1757 for a final fight in which he was badly beaten, dying from his injuries several months later. Most records date Taylor's championship to the middle 1730s.

c. ^ The initials on the box are normally read as A. G. for Ann Gill, but the G resembles a D, suggesting the box too may have been stolen.

d. ^ John Ireland identifies the president as "Mr Frieake, the master of Nourse, to whom Mr Potts was a pupil". Since Ireland identifies him as the master of Nourse, he undoubtedly means John Freke, an acquaintance of Hogarth's and surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital from 1729–1755 and a Governor 1736–1756. The dissection could be taking place at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where all three surgeons were based, but it also has features of the Cutlerian Theatre of the Royal College of Physicians near Newgate (particularly the throne, which bears their arms, and its curved wall resembling a cockpit) and the niches of the Barber-Surgeons' Hall (which was not used for dissection after the surgeons split away to form the Company of Surgeons in 1745).