2020, 306 pages, Kate Fullagar, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Reviewed by Margaret Cassidy
The myth of the Noble Savage has long existed in Western European thought and the arrival in Britain in 1774 of Omai (more correctly Mai as the O signifies “it is”), the first visitor from the Pacific islands, came to personify this myth. Whilst in Britain for two years Mai was feted by many and his likeness was painted by Joshua Reynolds, the leading painter of his generation. The Reynolds portrait is regarded as one of his finest – the subject of the Omai portrait is beautiful, grand, idealised and exotic in his clothing – and was displayed in the Royal Academy exhibition in 1776; yet this book explores how Reynolds was caught between the aesthetics that understood humanity as universal and a society that needed increasingly to justify colonialism. Reynolds himself worked hard to remain apolitical and his work demonstrates his ambivalence to imperial expansion.
Kate Fullagar’s book is a fascinating mix of art history focussing on the development of “universal man” portraiture with the rise of Joshua Reynolds, an exploration of competing political positions on the idea of empire, comparisons of society and the evolving awareness and importance of the individual in eighteenth century English, Polynesian and Native American culture. It is also the tale of the adventures of two men who travel to London – one from the edge of empire in Cherokee territory, North America and one from beyond empire in Ra’iatea via Tahiti in the Society Islands in the South Pacific and have their portraits painted by Reynolds, who himself had risen from the lowly position of apprentice phiz monger.
At the centre of this book is the history of these two portraits by Joshua Reynolds, inaugural head of the Royal Academy and usually regarded as the finest portraitist of the 18th century, who developed his “first idea of art” that art should show the indisputably “universal” general truths about humanity. His own very highly regarded portraits were based on the “universal” images of man that he had sketched from Roman statues on his youthful trip to Italy. He thought that the artist shouldn’t highlight the physical differences between individuals in their portraits as this drew “attention to what makes humans disagree with one another instead of to what unites them”. Reynolds’ challenge is the representation of the core idea of human universality when painting the likeness of Mai, the tattooed Polynesian traveller, and also previously the ochre-daubed Cherokee warrior known as Ostenaco. Reynolds never sold either portrait but regarded the latter portrait of Mai as far more successful than the earlier Ostenaco. In this portrait, Reynolds has Omai adopting the classical pose of the ancient Roman sculpture Apollo Belvedere.
Reynolds’ portrait of Ostenaco, also known as Syacust Ukah, was his first representation of a First Nation person and while completed in 1762, is not well known and now resides in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.
In contrast, the full-length portrait Reynolds completed in 1776 entitled Omai, the Polynesian who worked his passage to Britain as a crew member on HMS Adventure, one of two ships that formed the return leg of Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific, is regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s most important art works. Mai became a celebrity as the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain and his portrait by Joshua Reynolds is one of the great icons in the history of British art and has a highly controversial recent history. It is still in private hands after being most recently sold at Sothebys in 2001 for around £12.3 million, when it was the second-highest price ever paid for a British work of art. Sold to a then anonymous Irish investor, it has been refused a permanent UK export license although has been on loan in 2004 to a Reynolds exhibition in Ferrara, Italy and at the Tate in London, as well as to the National Gallery of Ireland until 2011 and was also part of the Rijksmuseum “High Society” exhibition in 2018, all on temporary export permits.
While Cook is portrayed by Fullagar and earlier historians as a reluctant host for Mai’s trip to Britain, it is suggested that he saw Mai as possibly a “kind of broker between Britain and a ‘New World’ Indigenous society”. Mai, like the Maori Hongi Hika who deliberately travelled to Britain a generation later to meet with King George III, was caught up in local disputes over land back home in the Society Islands and came seeking the special firepower that he had seen Europeans use in his home islands.
Reynolds’s Omai remains one of the great icons in the history of British art but the backstory as provided by Fullagar as an experiment in New Biography emphasising the historical nature of selves provides a fascinating insight into the diverse sense of self in the eighteenth century. While Reynolds regarded his portrayal of Mai as an example of his painterly prowess, this book reveals that he was an artist who took care not to be associated with excesses of imperialism. From Fullagar’s discussions of Reynolds’ development of his final portrait of Omai from his sketches of Mai, she concludes that Mai has become “an everyman from everywhen as well as everywhere”.