HODGES, William

(b. 1744 London, d. 1797 Brixham)

English landscape painter and engraver. He first attended classes at William Shipley’s Academy in the Strand, London, and from 1758 to 1765 was apprenticed to Richard Wilson (about whom he published a short biographical essay in 1790). Hodges followed Wilson’s classical landscape style periodically throughout his career, but his work took on a more personal character when he travelled as draughtsman with Captain Cook in 1772-75, and his finest paintings are those based on drawings he made of such exotic Pacific islands as Tahiti and Easter Island (examples are in the National Maritime Museum, London). In 1779-84 he was in India and in 1790 he visited the Continent, going as far as Russia. He did pictures for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and also some allegorical subjects, but in 1795 he abandoned painting and opened a bank in Dartmouth. It failed shortly before he died.

River Landscape

This painting represents a river landscape with monks conversing by a pair of megaliths, with ruins beyond.

Having trained at the Shipley Academy in the Strand, Hodges became a pupil and assistant to Richard Wilson from 1758 to 1765. Painted prior to his voyage to the South Pacific with Captain Cook in 1772, this picture is indebted to Wilson’s classical landscape.

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Tahiti Revisited

On the second voyage of Captain Cook (1744-97) William Hodges was the accompanying artist. His studies were full of documentary detail, but the paintings developed from them for exhibition at the Royal Academy were fully resolved works of art. In Tahiti Revisited shown in 1776, the admittedly rather classical landscape is filled with carefully observed details such as the native house, banana trees and the tattooed buttocks that so astonished Europeans.

The marvellously atmospheric handling of this and other pictures owed much to Hodges’s practice of making oil studies directly from the large window of Cook’s cabin.

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