Stages of Cruelty

Stages of Cruelty is an oil-on-canvas painting by the British artist Ford Madox Brown.

The composition was inspired by Arthur Hughes's 1856 painting April Love, which shows a woman turning away from her lover after an argument, and also by William Hogarth's series of engravings Four Stages of Cruelty.

In Brown's painting, a girl in a red dress and a white bonnet is shown sitting at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, spitefully hitting her bloodhound with a stem of love-lies-bleeding while the dog raises a paw in protest.

The man – her lover – looks mournfully over a wall at the woman, grasping her right hand and arm, but she rejects him without remorse.

The love-lies-bleeding stands for hopeless; the purple lilac for first love; and the bindweed (convolvulus) for extinguished hopes.