Need a little break from the world of winter dullness and bone-chilling commutes? Here's a lovely vision of paradise by William Hodges, a Georgian landscape painter who traveled on Captain Cook's expeditions to India and the Pacific.
Hodges evidently liked the view so much that he painted it twice, keeping the structure identical while letting the details vary in slight but telling ways. Standing between the two works at the National Maritime Museum's excellent Hodges retrospective a couple of weeks ago was like being inside a wood-panelled game of spot the difference.
The first of the two paintings, incidentally, must be among the few significant works of art that still have no web presence. You'd have to go to Yale or tour a stately home in Cambridgeshire to see it now.
But in the same room like that, the two paintings were worthy of an epiphany. First because they proved that Hodges had beat the now ubiquitous Photoshop image manipulators by about 200 years. Here was an image so vivid that the place within it could only have been real, and yet in the copy the captured moment had been expanded to include nude maidens, a shroud and distant wanderers that weren't there originally.
Look even closer and the drooping leaves of a plant, even the shape and size of a tree differ in ways that suggest more about the artist's active imagination than of a particular Tahitian bay at a particular moment in 1776.
The idea of Tahiti was what Hodges had to convey to an audience in London eager to see what Cook had found, and the idea that he chose to convey was paradise. We don't have to know that Tahiti is no longer a land of naked natives unchanged by European sensitivities and commercialization to realize that paradise is, and always has been, a mere idea -- and one that is defined most by what it is not, by the relative toil and ugliness of mundane life.
Take Iraq. Since most prominent evangelicals in the US have been busier recently with politics than with preaching, it fell to an aged and physically frail Billy Graham to remind people that Iraq is thought by many to have once been Eden. And it may be the closest thing to Hell on Earth right now, but for the Bush and Blair people Iraq is an experimental ideal brought to being by visionaries uncontrained by reality-based shackles.
William Langewiesche's much talked about reporting on Bagdad's Green Zone revealed a palace-dotted bubble within a war zone, a sealed-off outpost of Americana populated by a mock army of khaki and combat boot wearing idealists who strut about the place like modern-day Hemingways who have crossed the line into delusional perceptions of their role in relation to historic events.
In The Child that Books Built, a quirky memoir I'm reading, Francis Spufford quotes studies from the 19670s and 1970s that showed that children making up stories were much less likely to include themselves as characters, tell them in the present-tense or set them in a realistic setting if the storyline involved taboos or danger. This may tell us a lot about American enthusiasm for the distant war in Iraq, on a backdrop of terrorism and fear, I mean.
Near the end of his life, William Hodges sold all his paintings to pay off debts. He thought them worthless, and he couldn't have been more wrong about that since his ability to blend reality with ideals on canvas made him a Master to be rediscovered in a future century. Time may hold a different verdict for the reality-blenders of our present day.
