A View of Matavai Bay in the Island of Otaheite [Tahiti]
Date:
1776
Materials & Techniques:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
36 × 54 inches (91.4 × 137.2 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.343
Gallery Label:
The son of a blacksmith, William Hodges was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson. In 1772 the artist joined Captain James Cook’s second expedition to the South Pacific as a draftsman. During the grueling three-year voyage on the Resolution, Hodges produced a remarkable series of drawings and paintings of the indigenous peoples and landscapes of the South Seas, whose existence and physical appearance had previously been in the realm of fantasy for Europeans. After his return to London, Hodges exhibited this luminous view of Matavai Bay, Tahiti, at the Royal Academy. The painting, which depicts Tahitian war galleys, proclaims Hodges’s ambitions to be a chronicler of the course of the rapidly expanding British Empire but also reveals his sympathetic attitude toward the indigenous peoples he depicted, his sensitivity to light and atmosphere, and his poetic sensibility. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
