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Day Conference at the King's Manor 

Saturday 28th February 2004

The Enterprizing Artist: William Hodges in Britain, India and the South Seas 

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Speakers: John Bonehill, Natasha Eaton, Harriet Guest, Geoffrey Quilley, Nicholas Thomas

Convenor: Harriet Guest

In the late eighteenth century the range of Britain's trading and colonial interests across the globe expanded with extraordinary rapidity and energy, and that process dramatically shaped the career of the landscape-painter, William Hodges. Hodges was the most widely travelled English landscape-painter of his day. He travelled with Captain Cook to the South Seas in 1772-1775, and worked in northern India, under the patronage of Warren Hastings, from 1778-1784. He also toured in his own country, and across northern Europe, reaching St Petersburg in 1790. He bought to his travels an unusually innovative sense of the possibilities of landscape painting as a genre, which he had derived from his apprenticeship with Richard Wilson, and his work throughout his career is marked out by his adventurous, experimental sense of the nature and role of the genre.

It was Hodges's ambition to elevate the status of landscape painting 'to rival history-painting itself ... at the theoretical apex of pictorial art', as Bernard Smith has argued. He wrote that: 'Pictures are collected from their value as specimens of human excellence and genius exercised in a fine art; and justly are they so: but I cannot help thinking, that they would rise still higher in estimation, were they connected with the history of various countries, and did they faithfully represent the manners of mankind.' Hodges's paintings attempted to represent 'the manners of mankind in the varied shades from the Savage in the wilds to the highly civilized in the palace.' His landscapes reflect on the nature of civilization, and cultural as well as climatic difference, across an extraordinary assortment of countries and cultures. His work is therefore the focus of lively interest for students of the long eighteenth century and of colonial/postcolonial studies across a range of disciplines.

This day conference has been organised in anticipation of the major exhibition, William Hodges 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration, to be held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 6th July to 21st November, 2004. Hodges's work in India and the South Seas, as well as his controversial reputation in London, will be discussed.

Speakers

John Bonehill (University of Leicester), '"This Hapless Adventurer": William Hodges and the London Art World.'

Natasha Eaton (University of Manchester), 'Hodges's Visual Genealogy for colonial India, 1780-1795.'

Harriet Guest (University of York), 'The Consequences of War: Hodges's exhibition of 1794-5'

Geoff Quilley (National Maritime Museum), 'William Hodges: Artist of Empire.'

Nicholas Thomas (Goldsmith's College, London) 'Cook, Hodges, History and Anthropology'.