William Hodges was born in London on 28 October 1744. He was the only child of Ann and Charles Hodges, a blacksmith of St James's Market, London. His parents placed him at an early age in William Shipley's drawing school at Castle Court in the Strand. Hodges was subsequently apprenticed to the landscape painter Richard Wilson (1714-82) in 1758.

On leaving Wilson's studio in the mid-1760s, it is likely that Hodges worked as a theatrical scene painter in Derby. He also seems to have travelled and worked in Wales and the north of England at this time, before being appointed draughtsman to Cook's second voyage in mid-1772.

On his return to England in 1775, Hodges was employed by the Admiralty, supervising engravings being made after studies drawn on the voyage. He was also engaged in working up large-scale oil paintings intended to commemorate the voyage.

Between 1780 and 1784 Hodges was the first professional landscape painter to visit India, working for the East India Company and the then Governor-General, Warren Hastings. Hodges published an account of his Travels in India in 1793. He also published a dissertation on Indian architecture and a series of lavish prints entitled Select Views in India .

In early 1792 Hodges was employed briefly as scene painter to the Pantheon Opera House. A short-lived trip to St Petersburg and the court of the Russian empress Catherine the Great followed in 1793. In December 1794, Hodges staged a one-man exhibition at Orme's Rooms in Old Bond Street. This centred on two, epic allegorical landscapes entitled The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War . However, the show was closed following a visit from the Duke of York in January 1795.

The Duke considered Hodges's pictures dangerously radical during what was a period of war with revolutionary France. Hodges gave up painting shortly after this. He retired to Devon, and invested in a banking firm with the attorney, Thomas Gretton. Unable to withstand the banking crisis of 1797, which temporarily closed the Bank of England, the venture collapsed. Amid rumours of financial indiscretion and mismanagement, Hodges died on the 6th March 1797. There were suggestions that the artist killed himself but these rumours remain unsubstantiated.

Art on Cook's second voyage