Notes

One would have thought that Robert Hodgins was referencing the dramatic, if not arrogant opening line of Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick (1851), `Call me Ishmael!’, when he titled this spectacular large-scale portrait, but Hodgins’ inscription on the back of the canvas is a translation from the Hebrew Bible: `And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’. The biblical and the literary Ishmaels share similar experiences: one wandering the desert and the other wandering across the seas. Both are in constant flux, driven by insatiable curiosity and an inexhaustible sense of wonder. And both are miraculously rescued: one from thirst and the other from drowning. So, the name Ishmael has come to symbolise the great wanderer, the orphan, the exile, the social outcast. The man at odds with his fellow human beings.

Hodgins occasionally used the names of fictional characters in his titles – such as Ismael, and Ubu (from Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi), Don Giovanni (from Mozart’s opera) and Querelle of Brest (from a Jean Genet novel) – and occasionally of real people – like Anthony Blunt, Clement Greenberg and Igor Stravinsky – but these are outliers to his usual generic, unnamed types of businessmen, politicians, thugs, military officers and the like. All Hodgins’ individuals, types, and characters, and certainly Ishmael, have in common a mature and complex sensibility and a willingness to examine life objectively.