Zoom out. The figure is mid-stride. Turbaned, draped, his dress is immediately strange and naggingly familiar. He steps a bare foot forward. He gestures; he is about to declaim. And yet his face turns away. His lips are sealed. The figure is Mai, a youth from the sacred isle of Ra‘iātea, near Tahiti, birthplace of all gods and peoples of the world. He was the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, brought over by Captain Cook in 1774. He was the first Pacific Islander to visit the European region and make it back alive.

Reynolds’s painting of Mai has been a part of my life, unexpectedly, inadvertently, for twenty-five years. In 1999 I saw a grainy print of it in a book, when studying for my master’s degree in history. I was asking questions about Mai. Back then, those questions were about his popularity in Britain – what made him so fascinating to eighteenth-century Londoners? Joshua Reynolds was not the only local to be captivated. Mai was sketched in drawings, prints, ballads, newspapers, and philosophers’ tomes. He met King George III. He delighted the novelist Frances Burney. He prompted peals of laughter when he rode a horse down Oxford Street with the eccentric spy the Chevalière d’Éon. Some other individuals from some other remote parts of the world did not stir as much interest. I sensed that Mai could unlock something about the British empire’s understanding of the Pacific, of the exotic, of so-called savagery, of so-called civilisation.

I saw the eight-foot oil on canvas a few months later. It hung by the exit sign in a grand country house. I tried pulling this gorgeous version of Mai out of the painting with my eyes. I had new questions. Did Joshua dress you like that? Where are you going? What are you thinking? Aren’t you cold?

Mai didn’t answer. I left him there and went back to university to study for a doctorate.

During a 2001 conference presentation, someone asks me ‘what do you think of the recent sale of Reynolds’s Mai?’ I didn’t know it had gone to auction. The papers caught me up: the owners of the grand country house had been presented with a tricky tax bill. Sotheby’s assured them Mai could pay for it. The painting went in the end for £10.3 million – twice the auction estimate. I understand how Sotheby’s could get it wrong. The highest price for a Reynolds until then was not even £2 million.

Now the art world sat up. This was in fact the second-highest price paid for any painting by any British artist. What did it mean? Who was this berobed man? And who again, remind me, was Reynolds?  Interest intensified when the most important question of all could not be answered: who was the buyer? This entity remained, and remains, anonymous, though quickly and unanimously rumours pronounced it a foreigner. A racing magnate, of all things. Irish.

This meant the painting was going to leave the country. But it was so evidently desirable! The government slapped an export bar on it, an act which detains a work until public bodies can afford to buy it back – a standard move that has allowed for the repurchase of many treasures for national posterity. For the portrait of Mai, the Department of Culture needed a rationale. After hanging for so many decades beside the exit sign, the painting suddenly ticked all three possible reasons for detention: outstanding connection to British history, outstanding aesthetic importance, outstanding significance to learning. Mai was apparently ‘one of the first black visitors to be welcomed as an equal in English society, [showing] that Britain’s historical response to other cultures and races could be positive’.

The messaging was superb. Soon the work was ‘probably Reynolds’s masterpiece’. Soon, too, an offer of £12.5 million was on the table. Here, though, the story tipped into sensation. The anonymous buyer refused to sell. Stunned, the Department retaliated by extending, beyond all precedent, the export bar. In stalemate, Reynolds’s Mai was stored in a vault for the next four years (apart from a brief release for a Tate exhibition on celebrity). In 2006, the bar converted to a temporary export licence. Mr Anonymous directly lent the work to the National Gallery of Ireland.

At this stage, I thought I would write an article about all that had not been said: how no one had thought this painting a masterpiece before 2001; how still no one asked why a portrait of a Pacific man from an island few could place on a map was today the country’s greatest treasure; and how the buyer, while clearly trying to make money, also seemed to be making some kind of political point.

I published my piece in an academic journal, where it naturally died without notice (except from one art critic who told me it was defective). British art bodies continued to plead for a deal, now calling the work ‘an icon of all British art’ as well as the representation of ‘a unique moment in English history … when the empire stopped and paused for thought’. But what was that thought?

In 2018, Mr Anon. lent the painting to the Rijksmuseum.

It was Boris Johnson’s government that admitted defeat. A permanent export licence had to be granted: the market, after all, will out. The deadline was set for March 2023 – last chance for the big guns to make something work. Famous British intellectual Simon Schama appeared in a video, explaining that the work was ‘one of the all-time timeless masterpieces that painting could produce’. Mai was a ‘beautiful … Polynesian prince’ whose depiction here represented a moment ‘absolutely opposite’ to the usual image of a ‘ferocious looting rapacious’ empire. That moment, Schama says, spoke to ‘the possibilities of us all belonging to the same human family’.

Surely this escalating rhetoric had begun to overstep the bounds of believability? I wonder if I will never see the portrait again.

In March 2023, I happen to be teaching a class at the University of French Polynesia, on brief secondment from my Australian university. The campus is built high on a slope on the island of Tahiti, which is these days a French Overseas Territory. The view holds every visitor a willing hostage: glittering blue water, picture-book clouds, and distant Mo‘orea island.

We are about twenty kilometres west of Matavai Bay, where Mai first encountered a British ship. In 1767 he was living in Tahiti as a teenaged refugee from war-torn Ra‘iātea. Captain Samuel Wallis’s ship opened fire on hundreds of the Islanders milling about in boats and on the beach. Mai was hit by shrapnel on his torso. Seven years later, he would show the scar to his London hosts.

Walking along the outdoor hallway to the concrete classroom, I notice a poster for a campus play called ‘Oh My! O-Mai!’ It includes a photo of an actor dressed just like Reynolds’s Mai, gesticulating to an audience stage left. I’ll miss the play – it doesn’t open until the following month – but at least I know the students are familiar with this image.

I show them Schama’s video, though I worry they will feel confused, or misunderstood. Maybe angry. Instead, they laugh. They chuckle at the line about Mai being a prince. They hoot when Schama says the portrait demonstrates the opposite of rapacious empire. I know enough now about Islander laughter to realise it’s not the same as mine, but I’m still surprised. They are used to outsiders getting things wrong. They are also used to being polite about it. I say, Let’s talk.

They know that Mai was a young man from nearby Ra‘iātea, never an Arioi – never, therefore, born to lead. They also know he travelled with Cook to Britain and back. They know Cook was a harbinger of empire. Cook came and so traders came, and so whalers came, and so missionaries came. The British came so the French came. The French are still here.

I ask them, ‘Do you think the painting of Mai should be saved for Britain?’ I tell them the price tag is now 7 billion Pacific francs (£50 million). They are astounded at the cost. Many stop laughing. Several are proud to think a picture of one of them can fetch that much money. Others shake their heads at the customs of a foreign land. No one thinks the work should go to Tahiti instead. A few say, Well, if this kind of cash is possible, let’s have some things that travelled from here with Cook. Let’s have the heva tu papa‘u, the giant mourner’s costume elaborately fashioned from pearl shell, black feathers, coconut discs, and tapa. Let’s have the tiny carved sculpture of two tiki-like figures, imbued with a forgotten temple’s history and mana. The students know that both items are currently on loan from British institutions to their beautiful new regional museum, just down the hill from the university.

I’m moved that their interest is for Tahitian art and for art from even longer ago than the eighteenth century. Yet, I sense in the discussion not only a lack of interest in Reynolds but also a lack of interest in Mai. Who do they think this man was? He is far less famous among Islanders, I discover, than Mai’s arguable precursor – a fellow Ra‘iātea man called Tupaia. Unlike Mai, Tupaia had been a revered Arioi. He joined Cook’s first expedition in 1769 (Mai joined the second expedition in 1773). Tupaia died, though, before ever making it to Cook’s homeland, so he never prompted a British response. The students remember Tupaia because he was a high priest, a star navigator, an artist, a map-maker, and a warrior. One of them even bears his name. They suspect Mai, in comparison, might have been a charlatan: a pretender, a copycat. He wasn’t born special.

Gingerly, I try out a different telling. Just a boy when he was displaced from Ra‘iātea by warring Bora Borans, Mai grew up near to them here, on the black sands of Matavai Bay. A witness to Wallis’s arrival, then also to the first Endeavour arrival of Cook, he took careful note of British firepower. Far from shrinking from the muskets, though, Mai reacted with plans. Not a showboat or trickster, he saw in the visitors’ guns a means to his most cherished end: the restitution of Ra‘iātea from the Bora Borans. Guns were what he talked about most while in Britain, even though his British observers more commonly noted his remarks about the food, the beds, the pretty ladies. When they finally returned to the archipelago in 1777, Mai begged Cook to land him on Ra‘iātea. His tears at being deposited instead on the midway island of Huahine have been misinterpreted ever since as an attachment to Cook.

In the end, Cook gave him a few guns – better than nothing but less than expected. Mai managed to use them in various battles with the Bora Borans, but did not succeed in repelling his enemy before dying, young, around 1780. This Mai was no pawn of the British, no deserter, no egotist. He struck me as the reverse: someone who could use Britain for his purposes, a stayer, a reclaimer. An Islander.

The students still seem sceptical, but a handful declare they will now journey to the museum at the bottom of the hill to see the wooden stool Mai took with him to London – an artefact recently acquired and on display.

Despite my scepticism about the renewed campaign for Reynolds’s Mai, it succeeds. By April 2023 the owner has sold the work for £50 million to a consortium – half the costs met by British art funds and half by America’s Getty Foundation. The deal means the painting will become a child of shared custody, rotating every three years between London’s National Portrait Gallery and Los Angeles’s Getty Museum. So much for national posterity. It also amounts to the highest price ever paid for an eighteenth-century British artwork, and is today around the eighth-highest paid for any British artwork (it is outvalued by some Francis Bacons, a David Hockney, and a Lucian Freud).

One of the British art funds explains that the painting will help ‘diversify the national collection’. It’s a fair point, and one that furthers a laudable ambition, given the mismatch between what graces British public walls and what the British population currently looks like. No one, though, walks back the earlier comments about the work representing positive race relations or being the opposite of rapacious empire.

In this emphasis on diversity without rapacity, much depends on a general vagueness about Britain’s presence in the Pacific. As my Tahitian students were all too aware, Mai’s home islands are now associated with French imperialism, not the British empire. But what had Cook been doing there when he met Mai? During his first visit, he had declared sovereignty over the whole island group – Ra‘iātea, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Huahine, the lot. During his second, four years later, he shored up the claim, and accepted, if reluctantly, an Islander to voyage with him to London, in the traditional way of British imperialists who developed Indigenous go-betweens for a possible later settlement.

For sure, the declaration of sovereignty did not mean a great deal in the moment, since little changed on the ground and the Islanders never took it seriously. But the act did usher in all those traders, on their criss-crossing journeys between a new penal colony called New South Wales, a booming otter skin entrepôt in the American northwest, and the irresistible allure of tea in Macao. This in turn forged a route for the whalers, in their desperate experiment to match the slaughter rate of Britain’s northern fishery. And then came the missionaries, who by 1815 had displaced older forms of worship among the majority of Islanders.

This is not even to mention William Bligh’s official voyage to harvest breadfruits from Tahiti to feed Britain’s slaves in the Caribbean. After two generations, the pathogenic intensity of these intrusions had killed at least half the archipelago’s population. Many resources were also depleted. The British didn’t bother fighting for the islands when the French came seeking their own Pacific base in the 1830s.

If the portrait of Mai is not seen today as an artefact of Britain’s surge into the Pacific, how did its creator understand the context of his subject’s visit? Joshua Reynolds was a famously conciliatory character, careful to curate an apolitical persona amid the fiery debates of his era. But there is no way he could have missed the fieriest debate of all – that over Britain’s relentless imperial expansion. His close friend, the dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, was constantly in his ear about the ‘empty dignity of dominion’ and the ‘treachery [of] dispossession’. This anti-imperialist stance resonated with Reynolds’s attachment to neoclassical artistic principles, which assumed that all humans were roughly the same – a belief, Reynolds may have clocked, in direct conflict with acts of dominion and dispossession.

On the other hand, Reynolds’s equally dear friend, the parliamentarian Edmund Burke, had long whispered in his other ear about the benefits, indeed duties, of imperialism. He mixed speeches about the need to strengthen British resources with homilies about spreading constitutional government around the world. Reynolds was always aware, too, that the leading imperialists of the day – the officials, captains, princes, and merchants – formed the bulk of his clientele. This customer base had made Reynolds the most sought-after artist in the country and the inaugural president of the Royal Academy.

For an extreme people pleaser like Reynolds, such a situation was undoubtedly awkward. Friends against friends. Philosophy against business. Something of Reynolds’s unease might be sensed in how he handled his portrait of Mai after painting it. He never sold the work but hung it until death in his personal studio. Many pundits in recent years have taken this to be a sign of great pride, his desire to show off his best to any who called on him. But for a man who sold almost everything he did, actively preferring his paintings to hang on public walls, his hold on Mai’s portrait could likewise be a sign of ambivalence. He didn’t hate it, but he wanted to control its exposure.

Unease might also be seen in the painting itself. Mai’s dress is especially confusing – so strange, so familiar. During his sitting, Mai chose to wear examples of his customary tapa. But the figure’s ample swathes conjured, too, the ancient togas of Britain’s beloved classical heritage. Did Reynolds mean, as well, to invoke the Ottoman East? The fairly well known (to Londoners) African and Asian? The still rather unknown Native American? Viewers have discerned all these gestures in the work.

Reynolds was never wedded to literalism, and in fact believed it was the bane of his life, the tedious expectation of his powerful customers. Instead, he held that the point of art was to depict ‘general truths’ that transcended the ‘meretricious ornaments’ of particular times and cultures. The greatest general truth of neoclassical art was human sameness – as noted, a dangerous edict for an empire that required some humans to colonise other humans on the basis of superiority. Reynolds’s attempt to mute Mai’s particular time and culture by overloading his portrait with references to many different times and cultures was an effort to do that transcending work, to remind viewers of universal humanity.

The resultant mixture, though, turned out perhaps less legible than desired. Combined with a curiously averted gaze, and the failure of the eyes to confirm whatever claim the right hand is making, the effect is more obscuring than instructive.

Mai stays silent.

To a student of the Royal Academy in 1776, the most baffling thing about the painting was Mai’s tattooed left hand. Seven months after the work hung in the academy’s spring show, Sir Joshua, as President, delivered his annual lecture. That year’s theme, as chance would have it, was the contemporary vogue for literalism: when should artists indulge it and when should they resist? For the first time, Reynolds softened his hard line and admitted that the inclusion of certain ‘meretricious ornaments’ was acceptable – an Englishman’s powdered wig, for instance, or even a Cherokee’s ochre face paint. History’s details he deemed ‘very innocent’ and even, in their superficiality, reminds us that all peoples have them.

The exception, however, proved the decree. Some ornamentation, Reynolds intoned, went too far and his telling example was – it must have astonished his audience – Tahitian tattooing. This practice, Reynolds claimed, was too ‘destructive of health’ to be dignified. What he meant was that it cut too indelibly into the common body, it flaunted too extravagantly the differences between us. It raised the awful spectre that we might not, in the end, belong ‘to the same human family’.

Today, champions of the Mai portrait read the tattooed left hand as Reynolds had described wigs and ochre: cute particulars which are essentially, and equally, meaningless in the face of our shared humanity. But that is the reverse of how Reynolds understood the depiction of tattoos in British portraiture. Was his inclusion of them here then a mistake? A harmless example of how masters rarely practise what they preach? Or was it something else – a nod, maybe unwitting, to the impossibility of believing in both human sameness and empire? A nod, even, to the majority of his é lite patrons that their imperial ideology remained intact?

The distance between these questions and those now asked of the painting indicate how far we have travelled from Reynolds’s own context. These days observers focus more on the subject’s beauty and the creator’s skill. Its most attractive quality appears to be its capacity to brighten up imperial history, not its latent reminders of empire’s darkness.

But at this point I must curb my cynicism. The painting has been bought. However this came about, more of us than before can now see the work. The Irish owner played some interesting moves, but too few people were following along and too many were missing out on a chance to engage with it at all. 

For Reynolds’s Mai is, in the end, worth seeing. It is worth gazing into, if only to realise something about the complicated enmeshment of art, money, and national memory today. With just a little quiet time in its presence, forgetting the noise of the campaign, the work can also prompt deeper queries about the subject’s beauty and the creator’s skill. Why did Reynolds make Mai so lovely in his picture but at the same time so hard to pin down, so difficult to decipher? These problems bring us closer to the eighteenth century, and to some of the big ideas and outlandish ambitions of that age in Britain, as well as their ongoing legacies.

The best thing this painting might do, though, is turn our attention, finally, frankly, and fully, to Mai himself and his Pacific world. If the figure in this portrait is never giving up his thoughts or feelings, it doesn’t mean Mai’s story is lost completely. That story was always far bigger than whatever could be captured in a single portrayal by an artist who understood very little about his background or his dreams. From Mai’s perspective, it was even bigger than the story of the British empire. Encountering British voyagers before the traders and all that followed, Mai might have found them merely bit-part characters in his epic quest to regain a homeland.  The British stood always on the sidelines of a more urgent and intense drama.

It is Mai’s context that offers the clearest way to downplay the imperial angle in Reynolds’s work, if imperial downplaying is what is wanted. Not because this context diminishes the havoc wreaked by empire in those islands after Mai’s death, but because it refuses to allow empire to have the limelight in any account of them. The subject’s point of view means that empire cannot be the only thing said of the painting, be that positive or negative.

Mai’s vista is panoramic. It includes the arrival of the new but also the continuity of the old; the power and promise of ocean voyaging (his and Cook’s) but also the immovable centrality of Mai’s sea of islands.

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.