- Also known as
-
William Hodges
-
primary name: Hodges, William
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1744-1797
- Address
- Queen Street, May Fair (as print publisher, 1792-3)
- Biography
- Landscape painter and aquatinter; b. London 1744; d. Brixham 1797; trained in Shipley's Academy; pupil and assistant of Richard Wilson c. 1758-65; exhibited SA 1766-80, FS 1768 and 1774, and RA 1776-1794; elected ARA 1786 and RA 1787; joined Captain Cook's 2nd expedition on the Resolution to South Pacific as a draughtsman 1772-75; commissioned by the Admiralty to oversee the engraving of plates after his landscapes; in India 1780-84 under patronage of Warren Hastings, publishing his watercolours as large aquatints on return to England, and a narrative of his journey, at his own expense; painted scenes for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery; became Royal Landscape painter to the Prince of Wales; the failure of his Indian views and the loss of money in his one-man show in 1794-5 induced him to retire as artist in 1795 and he became a partner in a Devon bank, but the bank collapsed in 1797 and he went bankrupt to the tune of £4,000; as a result he committed suicide.
The names 'W Hodges' appears as publisher on some mezzotints by James Walker, in 1792, with the address 'Queen Street, May Fair', including the Infant Hercules after Reynold (Mannings 2094).
- Bibliography
- Isabel Combs Stuebe, 'The Life and Works of William Hodges', New York and London 1979
Geoff Quilley & John Bonehead (eds), 'WH, the art of exploration', National Maritime Museum 2004
Beth Fowkes Toben, 'Colonising nature, the tropics in British arts and letters 1760-1820', Philadelphia 2005
C. Wiebel, 'Aquatinta', exh.cat. Coburg, 2007, pp.237-244 .
