ABSTRACT
On July 6, 1785 Sir Joshua Reynolds’ conspicuous attendance at a public hanging of Peter Shaw, a former servant of Edmund Burke, was highly controversial and a “rare social gaffe” (Wendorf 33) that the artist committed. Privately defending his decision to attend in a letter to James Boswell, his companion at the execution, Reynolds remarked on the cathartic, masculinist, bracing effects that an execution has on a properly civilized spectator, who responds to the hanged man as if watching a carefully staged dramatic performance. Had he attempted, like Boswell, to make a broad public appeal for the aesthetic pleasure and humane grounds of witnessing a public hanging, Reynolds would have faced greater difficulty. Emergent sectors of society viewed such open forms of capital punishment otherwise. This was, after all, a time when the discourses of penology, religion, and politics were rallying against theatrical public executions.1 In addition, both Johnson, the leader of The Club to which Reynolds and Boswell belonged, and, more recently, Burke, another of its most formidable intellects, had written against the abuse of this practice.
