William Shipley’s Academy (London); apprenticed to landscape painter Richard Wilson (1758-65)
1765 – joins Incorporated Society of Artists and begins exhibiting there regularly
1772-75 –official artist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific, records scenes from Antarctica, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands
1775 –British Admiralty hires him to paint works based on Cook voyage sketches and oversee the production of engravings for Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole (1777)
1776 –begins exhibiting at the Royal Academy (RA)
1785 – Select Views in India (1785-88) published with 48 aquatints of Hodges’s drawings
1786 – elected to RA
1793 – Hodges’s Travels in India during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783 is published
1795 – privately exhibits two landscapes, Effects of Peace and Consequences of War (both untraced), which are censored by Prince George (later King George IV) for their critical political overtones; Hodges retires
Switzerland and Germany (1771); New Zealand, Antarctica, Pacific islands (1772-75); India (1779-83); Russia (1792)
British Government; Warren Hastings, Governor General of Bengal
Mrs. Hastings near the Rocks of Colgong, 1790 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven)
Guest, Harriet. “The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 12, no. 2 (1989): 36-58
Simmons, Laurence. Tuhituhi: William Hodges, Cook's Painter in the South Pacific. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2011