William Hodges is well known as the artist who accom-panied Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific as official landscape painter. This book forms a major re-appraisal of his career and reputation, arguing a central place for him in the development of British art.The nine essays included in this catalogue are by some of the fore-most scholars in the area. They consider Hodges’s work comparatively, in terms of the rise of ethnology, the investigation of Indian history, the encounter with peoples ‘without history’ and the development of empir-ical science and rationalism.

Foreword by Sir David Attenborough

Preface by Roy Clare, Director, National Maritime Museum

Preface by Amy Meyers, Director, Yale Center for British Art and

  Brian Allen, Director, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

List of Lenders

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

William Hodges: artist of empire

GEOFF QUILLEY

‘This hapless adventurer’: Hodges and the London art world

JOHN BONEHILL

Hodges and attribution

CHARLES GREIG

‘Philanthropy seems natural to mankind’: Hodges and Captain Cook’s

second voyage to the South Seas

DAVID BINDMAN

Hodges as anthropologist and historian

NICHOLAS THOMAS

Hodges’s visual genealogy for colonial India, 178o-95

NATASHA EATON  

The artist’s ‘I’in Hodges’s TRavels in India

BETH FOWKES TOBIN

Hodges and Indian architecture

GILES TILLOTSON

‘The Consequences of War’ in the winter of 1794-95

HARRIET GUEST

Catalogue

Part One: Making Pacific History

The maritime context, 1768-75

PIETER VAN DER MERWE

Hodges and Cook’s second voyage

JOHN BONEHILL

Hodges’s post-voyage work

JOHN BONEHILL

Part Two: Picturing the History of India

Hodges and India

GEOFF QUILLEY

Part Three: Representing Britishness

Hodges’s British subjects

GEOFF QUILLEY

Appendix: Hodges’s catalogue description of

The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War

Bibliography

Index