@mastersthesis {12076,
	title = {The Sheriff{\textquoteright}s Picture Frame{\textquoteright}: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain},
	year = {2015},
	school = {Yale},
	abstract = {This dissertation is the first to consider the relationship between the production of art-its making and its conceptualization-and the spectacle of punishment in eighteenth-century Britain. Throughout this period, public hanging remained the primary means of criminal deterrence in mainland Britain. In many cases, this ultimate penalty was supplemented by others. The corpses of hanged highwaymen were gibbeted; those of murderers dissected and laid open to view. Who attended these events? What were they meant to see, and what-as far as can be told-did they actually see? And how was such seeing understood to enable, impair, or otherwise condition their visual experience of other things-for example, a picture, sculpture, or print?
Focusing on Tyburn, London{\textquoteright}s chief execution ground, chapter 1 establishes the public execution as a key site of eighteenth-century British visual culture. With the aid of drawings, prints, newspaper accounts, and other published commentaries, it examines the ritual, space, and spectators of Tyburn, as well as the moral and aesthetic theories that underpinned the executions staged there. The subsequent three chapters unfold as a series of chronological case studies, each one exploring a specific point of intersection between eighteenth-century spheres of punishment and contemporary practices of art making, instruction, and display.
Chapter 2 concentrates on the art of William Hogarth and, in particular, on his Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), the most brutally violent of his graphic works. Situating the series in relation to ongoing anxieties and debates over London{\textquoteright}s mounting crime rates, it advances a new reading of this work as one that is centrally concerned with the social and moral effects-the powers and dangers-of spectacular punishment.
Chapter 3 investigates the appropriation of criminal bodies for the instruction of artists at London{\textquoteright}s Saint Martin{\textquoteright}s Lane and Royal Academies, focusing particularly on a group of plaster-cast anatomical models produced by the physician William Hunter from the bodies of hanged felons. Hunter{\textquoteright}s casts were conceived as tools of the academy. However, they are also works, this chapter argues, that actively participated in and were fundamentally shaped by contemporary punishment practices.
Finally, chapter 4 explores the relationship between the evolving ritual of public execution and a crucial development in the art culture of this period: the emergence of the public art exhibition. Taking its cue from a popular eighteenth-century term for the gallows-"the sheriff{\textquoteright}s picture frame"-it proposes that painting{\textquoteright}s new subjects, audiences, and aims developed in relation and opposition to the "pictures" framed at Tyburn (and later Newgate) gallows, and to the public audiences called forth there. In eighteenth-century Britain, the very notion of the work of fine art-what it ought to look like, how it ought to function, and whom it ought to reach-was defined with and against the sight of execution.
Ultimately, this dissertation seeks not only to bring a new set of histories to light, but also to revise long-dominant art-historical narratives. While past accounts have placed overwhelming emphasis on the refinement, modernity, and "politeness" of eighteenth-century British art and culture, this project foregrounds the formative role that brutal and ostensibly pre-modern modes of violence played in its creation.},
	keywords = {Eighteenth-Century Art},
	author = {Gamer, Meredith}
}
