The galleries: 'Noble savage' in sublime setting

William Hodges' Cascade Cove, Dusky Bay.

Auckland City Gallery is home to splendid images of voyaging, famously, the dramatic Goldie and Steele painting of the arrival of the Maori and the contrasting, serene painting of the same legend by Kennet Watkins.

These images give an extra dimension to the extensive collection by the widely travelled artist William Hodges (1744-97) that comes from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. They are at the gallery until August 21.

Hodges was the official artist appointed by the Admiralty in 1772 to accompany Captain Cook on his second voyage to our shores.

One striking work is a strong and direct portrait of Cook. It is not much more than a big sketch but it catches the tough and resolute nature of the man much more than the famous official portrait by Nathaniel Dance.

The portrait is exceptional because Hodges was appointed as a landscape painter. His work is highly skilful. He began as a pupil of the famous Richard Wilson who emphasised the grandeur of nature and peppered his paintings with ruins to show the transience of human endeavour. Hodges saw ruins everywhere when he went to India and even once, spectacularly, in Cook Strait.

After Cook's venture into Antarctica, the explorer moored his ship Resolution in Dusky Sound, Fiordland. Hodges made many watercolours and drawings, most of which he worked up into large oil paintings when he returned to England.

One of these paintings is from the gallery's own collection. It is probably the first painting of a Maori by a professional artist. It is circular and shows a warrior standing on a rock in Dusky Sound. He carries an unusually large taiaha and stands in the heroic pose of an ancient Greek statue. This is indeed the "noble savage" beloved of the 18th century.

Exceptionally, one painting was probably done on the spot in Dusky Sound. It illustrates both the housekeeping and scientific interests of Cook's crew. The Resolution is moored close to a bank and a fallen tree provides a gangway. The bush around is dark and overwhelming except for a clearing where the crew's washing is hung and a tent erected for the savants.

More spectacular are the two larger paintings of New Zealand. The 18th century cultivated the sublime and there is a painting of Cascade Cove in Dusky Sound where a waterfall thunders majestically over rocks and its spray forms a rainbow. The power of nature in these remote lands is emphasised even more in the dramatic View Of Cape Stevens in Cook's Straits with Waterspout.

This is the finest painting in the exhibition. It shows a storm with four waterspouts close to the tiny ship. On a rocky promontory near the ship, lightning has struck a pa and set it alight. This is Turner's Romantic vision of humanity helpless against the force of nature, but done long before Turner.

The exhibition extends to Hodges' paintings of New Caledonia and Tahiti. A painting of the colossal monuments on Easter Island is particularly powerful. Hodges' Indian works in the show have their own considerable interest. They are more tranquil than the paintings of the wild coasts of New Zealand and much more adorned with picturesque ruins.

In an intelligent piece of curatorship, the gallery has matched the Hodges exhibition with a small show of Colin McCahon's waterfall paintings that were influenced by the Cascade Cove painting. McCahon uses the waterfall as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. He acknowledges the debt by using some of the same colours as Hodges. There are also some splendidly atmospheric panoramic photographs taken by Mark Adams in Dusky Sound, of places where the painter must have stood.

This welcome exhibition is an excellent exploration of those times when, in Allen Curnow's marvellous words, "Simply by sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world".