Fourth Stage of Cruelty (Reward of Cruelty)

One of four drawings for the engraved series "Four Stages of Cruelty".
Fresh from the gallows, Nero's corpse is brought to a medical theater, where it is disemboweled and dissected by three surgeons while a senior faculty member supervises. As one surgeon pierces Nero's eye socket, another delves into his rib cage to pull out his intestines, which an attendant stuffs into a bucket. In the foreground, a dog licks Nero's heart in an act of poetic justice. Bones boil in a cauldron at right, indicating that the ultimate fate of Nero's body is to await reassembly into an anatomical model - a truly fitting end to his career as an abusive miscreant.
Closely corresponding to the preparatory drawing in almost all respects, the final print in the series also adds contemporary references. The skeletons on view are identified as James Field, the boxer-turned-thief named in the engraving of the second stage, and James Macleane, the gentleman highwayman. Field was hanged for robbery eleven days before the prints were published, and Macleane had been executed in October 1750. The topic of seizing hanged bodies for anatomical study generated public controversy in the late 1740s, but within a year of the publication of Hogarth's series, the 1752 Murder Act declared the dissection of hanged bodies permissible. -- Exhibition Label, from "Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor"
See also the records for the rest of the drawings in this series of four scenes (III,32b; III, 32c; III, 32d; III, 32e).