 | This 1776 work by William Hodges is titled "A View of Maitavie Bay, in the Island of Otaheite [Tahiti]." |
Paintings by an artist who brought back the first images of such far-off lands as Tahiti, New Zealand and India to 18th-century Europeans will be featured in the next exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.
The museum is the only U.S. venue for the show, titled "William Hodges, 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration." In conjunction with the exhibition, the British Art Center is also presenting a companion display, titled "Nobleness and Grandeur: Forging Historical Landscape in Britain, 1760-1850." Both will be on view Jan. 27-April 24.
The Hodges retrospective features nearly 50 oil paintings by the artist, who journeyed with the renowned explorer Captain James Cook and was the first professional British painter to travel to India.
Organized by the National Maritime Museum in London, the show underscores Hodges' central role in disseminating visual knowledge of distant lands and cultures during the greatest era of European geographical exploration.
"This exhibition will demonstrate that William Hodges has, until now, been the most unjustly neglected British painter of the 18th century," writes British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough in the foreward of the accompanying catalogue.
The son of a London blacksmith, Hodges was apprenticed at age 14 to landscape painter Richard Wilson, whom he considered to be the "greatest modern master of that art."
Hodges was the official draftsman on Cook's second voyage to the Pacific (1772-1775), traveling to Polynesia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. During the three-year voyage aboard the "Resolution," the crew met with extremes of weather and environment, including Cook's unprecedented forays south into Antarctic waters. An x-ray of Hodges painting "Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay Sound, New Zealand" (April 1773) reveals a second painting hidden underneath, which is believed to be the world's earliest surviving depiction of Antarctica.
The artist's paintings of Tahiti, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands were a revelation for audiences in Europe.
Several years after his return from the Cook expedition, Hodges arrived in India and spent three and a half years traveling the country under the patronage of Warren Hastings, a key member of the East India Company and the first governor-general
Hodges' "Select Views of India," published in London 1785-1788, consisted of 48 fine prints after his original compositions. The artist also wrote the scholarly work "A Dissertation on the Prototypes of Architecture, Hindoo [sic], Moorish, and Gothic" and one of the earliest published travel accounts by a professional artist, "Travels in India."
Returning to England in 1784, Hodges continued to paint for another decade. Despite exhibiting at the Royal Academy and being elected a member in 1787, he died bankrupt. His final exhibition in 1794 was closed down after the Duke of York thought he perceived French Revolutionary sympathies in the artist's work. Subsequently, Hodges gave up painting and established a banking partnership, which failed in the uncertain climate of the war with France. He died in 1797, possibly by suicide.
The exhibition examines Hodges' paintings in the context of the rise of ethnology, the study of Indian history, the British encounter with indigenous peoples, and the development of modern science in the Age of Reason. Many of the works in the show have not been on display since the artist's lifetime, and this is the first time that the Cook and India works have been shown together.
"With 'empire' at the center of debates about the teachings of history," says the exhibition's curator, Geoff Quilley of the National Maritime Museum in London, "Hodges' wonderful, overlooked paintings are more important than ever."
The Paul Mellon Centre in London provided support for the exhibition and the maritime museum's conference on the show last summer. The accompanying catalogue, which is fully illustrated, was published by Yale University Press and is on sale in the British Art Center's museum shop. Angus Trumble, the Yale center's curator of paintings and sculpture, is the in-house curator for the exhibition.
To complement the Hodges retrospective, the Yale Center for British Art is presenting "Nobleness and Grandeur: Forging Historical Landscape in Britain, 1760-1850," a selection of works from the museum's own collection of paintings, prints, drawings and rare books.
"Nobleness and Grandeur" charts the development of the genre of historical landscape in Britain, from its creation in the mid-18th century by Hodges' mentor Richard Wilson to its culmination in the Romantic period.
This is the first exhibition to explore the role played by landscape art in the development of the political and artistic identity of 18th-century Britain, according to the show's organizer, Olivia Horsfall Turner, a graduate student in the history of art who formerly studied at Yale and is now at University College, London.
The exhibition features some of Wilson's most celebrated historical landscapes, including his landmark painting "The Destruction of Niobe's Children," as well as works by Hodges, Thomas Gainsborough, John Martin, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon-5 p.m. Sunday. The museum is accessible to individuals using wheelchairs. For further information, call the center at (203) 432-2800 or visit the website at www.yale.edu/ycba.
T H I S
Exhibits feature landscape paintings
in era of British exploration
of India.
"Nobleness and Grandeur"
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