William Hodges opened the South Seas to the European imagination in the 18th century. His landscape paintings of exotic beauty and sensibility changed Europeans' views of the world beyond Europe and ignited the desire for a paradise with the wave of Western colonialism (Quilley 2004, 1-4). Marking a departure from the classical landscape tradition was Hodges's plein air technique, which infused his mythical images with natural open-air light and the richly compelling beauty typical of the Southern Hemisphere. In presenting historical events, he proceeded with an intuitive understanding of the whole, not with the particularities of details, for an unmistakable quality of visual documentation. Some contemporary art critics claim, however, that Hodges is merely an artist of empire, who danced to "Rule Britannia" and hastened the death of the ancient South Pacific world. But his contribution to the British landscape imagination as the first professional landscape painter to represent the Pacific should not be underestimated. Hodges was the most traveled artist of his time, depicting vast global territories so profusely. Apprenticed to the landscape painter Richard Wilson, he participated in James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific as a draftsman in 1772 (Smith 1992, 115). This expedition artist, employed by the Admiralty, produced many portrait sketches and large-scale landscape oil paintings of coastal scenes in the South Pacific and Antarctic. In 1778 he visited India as the first professional landscape painter and worked for the East India Company for six years. Later in life, he traveled to Europe and worked briefly as a landscape painter at the Pantheon Opera House in St. Petersburg, Russia (Smith 1992, 13). Hodges... center of paper... globe. Hodges figures in the broader context of the history of 18th-century imperialism, and his art gains ground in the expansion of British art. And he presented the non-European world through the filter of the European vision. However, Hodges was not a supporter of the war. He sometimes lamented the ruinous impact of the war. The Tahitian tragedy is not directly attributable to his paintings. His role has been debated at length but without conclusion. On the contrary, no one doubts Hodges' artistic qualities. His paintings have an emphatic and unambiguous visual documentation quality, demonstrating the mix of immediacy and idealization. Despite the end of the Enlightenment and imperialism, Hodges' place as a professional landscape painter in art history is solid. His paintings are still exhibited at the Queen's House in Greenwich in London.