English landscape painter and engraver. He first attended classes at William Shipley's Academy in the Strand, London, and from 1758 to 1765 was apprenticed to Richard Wilson (about whom he published a short biographical essay in 1790). Hodges followed Wilson's classical landscape style periodically throughout his career, but his work took on a more personal character when he travelled as draughtsman with Captain Cook in 1772-75, and his finest paintings are those based on drawings he made of such exotic Pacific islands as Tahiti and Easter Island (examples are in the National Maritime Museum, London). In 1779-84 he was in India and in 1790 he visited the Continent, going as far as Russia. He did pictures for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and also some allegorical subjects, but in 1795 he abandoned painting and opened a bank in Dartmouth. It failed shortly before he died.
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