William Hodges

William Hodges was an English painter who trained under William Shipley and Richard Wilson spending his early career painting theatrical sceneries. In 1772, he was appointed a member of James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Ocean and is best known for the sketches and paintings of locations he visited on that voyage for five years including Table Bay, Tahiti, Easter Island, and the Antarctic. Most of the large-scale landscape oil paintings from his Pacific travels were produced after his return to London. He even received a salary from the Admiralty for the purposes of completing them. These paintings are especially notable as being some of the first to use chiaroscuro technique for dramatic purposes in landscapes. Hodges use of light as a compositional element in its own right was a marked departure from the classical landscape tradition. It established him as an artist of merit. In 1778, Hodges travelled to India, the first English professional landscape painter to visit the British colony. He arrived in Calcutta and under the patronage of Warren Hastings produced several deeply impressive paintings. He extensively covered the Gangetic plains and western India capturing its novel and diverse landscape, myriad of temple complexes and stayed in Lucknow for 6 years. Upon his return to England in 1783, his famous series titled ‘Select views of India’ was published along with descriptions. It was dedicated to the East India Company who acquired many of his paintings. The aquatint was a fledging technique at the time but Hodge’s exceptional skill retained the atmospheric qualities of his original sketches.

A royal censorship of an exhibition in 1795 effectively ended Hodges career as a painter. Hodges retired and became involved with a bank which failed during the banking crisis of March, 1797. On March 6 of that year, he died from what was officially recorded as "gout in the stomach", but which was also rumored to be suicide from an overdose of laudanum.