William Hodges

William Hodges RA (1744-1797) joined Captain Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean.  He made his name with the sketches and paintings of locations he visited on that voyage, including Table Bay, Tahiti, Easter Island, New Zealand, Dusky Sound and the Antarctic.

After leaving Cook’s service, he went to India and in 1781 met Warren Hastings who became his life-long friend and patron. Inspired by all he saw, he not only recorded the construction of some of the early English buildings in Calcutta, but also made three journeys up-country, recording his observations. Arriving back in London in 1784, he single-handedly produced the prints for this publication from his drawings and paintings. The aquatint technique, then in its infancy, was used with exceptional fluency by Hodges to preserve the atmospheric quality of his original sketches.

The result was Select Views in India (1785-1788), the first of the great illustrated books on India, which also includes the first European depiction in a book of the Taj Mahal.