THE National Maritime Museum has tracked down a pair of images that closed a London exhibition in 1794 because they regarded as dangerously political.
A London dealer came forward with prints of the lost paintings after reading in The Times this July that the museum was appealing for help in locating the images.
They are the work of William Hodges, official draughtsman on Captain Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific in the 1770s. In 1794, at a time of war with revolutionary France, The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War was politically risky.
One of the paintings, inspired by a Gillray lampoon, depicted a farmer lying on his back, his cottage ruined and a city on fire in the distance; the area is overrun by an invading army.
The Duke of York, George III’s son, felt that the pictures displayed republican sympathies. He was just back from an unsuccessful campaign in Flanders when he visited the exhibition in Orme’s Gallery, Old Bond Street, and reportedly “abused his pictures as being of a political tendency”.
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With those words, Hodges was damned. Aged 51, he never painted again and died, possibly by suicide, in 1797. The paintings were sold for paltry sums at Christie’s and disappeared without trace.
After the Times report Geoff Quilley, the museum’s curator of maritime art, was contacted by Nigel Talbot, of Grosvenor Prints, who believed he had two prints that had been made at the time the originals were exhibited in 1794. Each is 3ft wide.
The museum said: “It has been widely assumed that following the controversy surrounding the works, the prints were never produced. This discovery proves otherwise.”
The museum has bought the prints and will be adding them to its current Hodges exhibition, which continues until November 21.