City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London
by Meredith Gamer

The macabre, interwoven histories of art and punishment in eighteenth-century London.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the visual arts in Britain flourished as never before. The nation’s first art academies were founded; its first exhibitions of contemporary art were staged; and a vastly expanded public for the arts began to form. This book demonstrates that these developments were intimately linked to another, darker kind of art: the spectacle of capital punishment. Between 1680 and 1820, the number of crimes punishable by death under British law rose dramatically – from roughly fifty to more than two hundred – and at Tyburn, London’s main execution ground, dozens of people were hanged each year before thousands of spectators.

City of the Gallows uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.

About the Author

Meredith Gamer is an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her teaching and scholarship focus on the art and visual culture of eighteenth-century Britain and the Atlantic world, with particular attention to histories of punishment, medicine, empire, and enslavement. Her first book, City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London, was published in June with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, in association with Yale University Press. In 2014, Meredith co-curated the exhibition Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain at the Yale Center for British Art.

About the Speakers

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an historian of architecture from the eighteenth century up to the present. Çelik Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She co-edited, with John May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data, an account of storehouses of information in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European art at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching concern the interconnected histories of art, visual culture, and material culture in Britain, France, South Asia, and the Atlantic world. Her first book, Enlightened Relations: Imperial Power and Artistic Form in 18th-Century Britain, will be out in Spring 2027 with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Jenny Davidson teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. She was a member of the inaugural class of fellows at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination at Reid Hall in Paris and was a Heyman Center Faculty Fellow in 2025-26. She is currently finishing a book titled Edward Gibbon's Empires: The First Modern History and the Worlds It Made, which is under contract to Harvard University Press.

Avinoam Shalem is the Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam at Columbia University. Shalem’s main fields of interest concern the global context of the visual cultures of the world of Islam in the Mediterranean, medieval aesthetic thoughts on visual arts and craftsmanship, and the making of the image of 'Islamic' art as well as the modern historiography of the field. He has published extensively on medieval Islamic, as well as on Jewish and Christian art.

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