William Hodges 1744-1797

Book excerpt: William Hodges is well known as the artist who accompanied Cook's second voyage to the South Pacific as official landscape painter. This book forms a major reappraisal 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 foremost 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 empirical science and rationalism.