In this area of the site you can explore four Admiralty paintings. You can view key details on each painting for each of three themes – subject, composition and meaning. To take a closer look, use the zoom feature underneath each painting.

William Hodges was the artist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his second voyage to the South Seas (1772-75). On his return to London, the Lords of the Admiralty commissioned him to produce works to commemorate the voyage, including these four paintings. They are identical in size, and broadly similar in composition.

The works comment on the historical significance of the voyage's navigational and scientific achievements. In accord with the importance of their subjects, Hodges's paintings are suitably epic in conception. They are indicative of the artist's ambitious attempts to elevate the status of landscape painting.

Hodges was a 'philosophical' artist. He aimed to make his paintings objects of moral reflection. His interest in contemporary debates on the history of human progress, for example, is clear in these post-voyage paintings.

Hodges's paintings were highly original, both in their exotic subject matter and in the artist's interest in philosophical and scientific issues. It is important to remember that Hodges had been trained as a landscape painter in the Grand Style. These four paintings are an intriguing combination of naturalistic observation and the classical idealism of artists like Claude Lorrain (1604-82) or the sublime landscapes of Salvator Rosa (1615-73). They present new kinds of ethnographic and geographic knowledge, filtered through the conventions of European landscape painting.

The menu images show a detail from each painting. Click one of these images to begin.