European Painting

2002 Words5 Pages

William Hodges opened the South Seas to the European imagination in the eighteenth century. His landscape paintings of exotic beauty and sensitivity changed European’s outlook on the world beyond Europe and ignited the yearnings for a paradise with the surge of Western colonialism (Quilley 2004, 1-4). Marking a departure from the classical landscape tradition was Hodges’ en plein air technique, which infused his mythical imagery with natural light in the open air and richly compelling beauty peculiar to the southern hemisphere. In presenting historic events, he proceeded with intuitive understanding of a whole, not with particularities of details, for unambiguous quality of visual documentation. Some contemporary art critiques say, however, Hodges is just an artist of empire, who danced to the chorus of “Rule Britannia” and accelerated the death of ancient South Pacific world. But his contribution to British landscape imagery as the first professional landscape artist to represent the Pacific should not be underrated.

Hodges was the most widely travelled artist of his day, representing extensive global territories so profusely. Apprenticed to landscape painter Richard Wilson, he was on James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific as a draughtsman in 1772 (Smith 1992, 115). This expedition artist, who was employed by the Admiralty, produced many portrait sketches and large-scale landscape oil paintings of coastal scenes in the South Pacific and the Antarctic. In 1778, he visited India as a first professional landscape painter, and worked for the East India Company for six years. Later in life, he travelled Europe, and briefly worked as a landscape painter at the Pantheon Opera House in St. Petersburg, Russia (Smith 1992, 13). Hodges ...

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... globe. Hodges figured within the larger context of the history of eighteenth-century imperialism and his art gained ground within the expansion of the British art. And he presented the non-European world through the filter of European vision. However, Hodges was not an advocate of war. Sometimes he lamented the ruinous impact of war. The tragedy of Tahiti is not directly attributable to his paintings. His role was debated at great length but without conclusion. On the contrary, nobody doubts about Hodges’s artistic qualities. His paintings have emphatic and unambiguous quality of visual documentation, which demonstrate the mix of immediacy and idealization. Despite the Enlightenment and imperialism ended, Hodges’s place as a professional landscape painter in the art history is solid. His paintings are still at display at the Queen’s House at Greenwich in London.

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