William Hogarth

One of four drawings for the engraved series "Four Stages of Cruelty."
Here we meet the youthful protagonist of the Stages of Cruelty series, Tom Nero. An orphan lacking parental guidance, Nero ignores the well-dressed boy offering him a tart and continues sodomizing a dog with the sharp end of an arrow as his mates hold the hound in place. All around them, other children demonstrate this nascent stage of cruelty: tying a bone to a dog's tail, staging a cock-throwing contest, and hanging two cats by the tail. The animals turn on each other, and a dog disembowels a cat in the foreground. Eerily hinting at Nero's fate, another child labels his hangman drawing Tom. Working on this drawing after an initial study in the Yale Center for British Art, Hogarth adjusted the scale of the figures relative to their setting and made other refinements to the composition in preparation for the print.
Hogarth began making prints after drawings rather than paintings in the 1740s. This new process, in which he controlled everything from the initial sketch to the printing of the finished plate, meant that his methods could be highly idiosyncratic. While the Morgan's red-chalk studies certainly reflect Hogarth's constant reworking, it is unclear if they served only as model drawings for the prints or if they also functioned as advertisements for potential customers in his printshop.
Hogarth's prints for the Stages of Cruelty appeared on 21 February 1751, a week after Beer Street and Gin Lane were issued. These four prints were executed in the same coarse, linear style, and Hogarth's moral purpose was hammered home through verses by the same author, the artist's friend Reverend James Townley. In the print of the First Stage of Cruelty Hogarth added a badge with the initials SG to Tom Nero's jacket sleeve, indicating he is in the care of the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, the same location represented in Gin Lane. As was his tendency, Hogarth also found opportunities to squeeze in more anecdotal detail in the print, here adding another instance of torture behind the balustrade at right: two boys hold a bird, and one blinds it using a heated wire. -- 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).