Available and Accessible

In late March, the National Portrait Gallery announced that it had raised nearly half the £50 million required to buy Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Ma'i, which depicts a young Polynesian man who travelled to Britain on one of James Cook’s ships. The fundraising campaign was launched after the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport slapped the painting with a temporary export bar last year. ‘This acquisition is one of the most significant our nation could ever make,’ the NPG’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, said, ‘and will be remembered, and enjoyed, for generations.’

The National Heritage Memorial Fund, a state-administered fund fed by the National Lottery, provided £10 million and the Art Fund gave £2.5 million, its largest ever grant. On 31 March, the NPG revealed that it had not been able to raise the money required through public subscription before the deadline, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles had stepped in to provide half in a joint acquisition. The two museums will take it in turns to display the painting.

Portrait of Ma'i was painted in Reynolds’s studio during Ma'i’s stay in London between 1774 and 1776. It shows a strikingly confident young man with tattooed hands and forearms, in flowing cream and white robes and a white turban, set against an imagined tropical island landscape. Ma'i (c.1753-79), the son of a landowner from the Polynesian island of Ra'iatea, was briefly a celebrity in Georgian England, publicised as the first Polynesian visitor to Britain. Reynolds’s decision to paint the prince without a clear commission indicates the fascination Ma'i held for London high society. Cook’s voyages had taken hold of the public imagination and there was significant European interest in Polynesia as a site of natural history and what we understand today as anthropology.

The modern attention paid to Ma'i’s portrait is not dissimilar. In a video on the Art Fund’s donation page, Simon Schama extols Reynolds’s arresting treatment of Ma'i’s gaze, garb, tattoos and pose (modelled on the Apollo Belvedere) as evidence of the renewed humanity of imperial British exploration and conquest, ‘a vision of the possibility of us all belonging to the same human family’.

Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in the Guardian in March that though the portrait plays on themes of the ‘noble savage’, it ‘combines the confidence of Britain on the eve of world power, the majestic dignity of an adventurous Polynesian, the masterpiece of a genius – and the singular thrill of this incandescent meeting of all three’. Both testimonials end with appeals for the portrait to remain in Britain, on public display. ‘It must be available and accessible to everybody in this country,’ Schama says, ‘and millions coming from abroad who should be seeing this.’

But at what cost? The price was set by the painting’s current owner, the Irish racehorse breeder John Magnier, who bought it twenty years ago. (It had hung in Castle Howard, the property of the fifth earl of Carlisle and his descendants, for two hundred years before that.) Magnier may have had an interested international buyer offering £50 million, but the justification for such an enormous sum is unclear.

Export bans are decided by the eight specialists of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, a body administered by Arts Council England. The Committee assesses applications to remove works from the country against a set of criteria determined by the Waverley Report of 1952, and makes a recommendation to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport regarding the granting of the licence. There are three possible grounds, of which only one need apply: history, aesthetics and scholarship. The committee denied Magnier an export licence for Portrait of Ma'i in 2002, arguing that the painting met all three criteria. But its historical, aesthetic and scholarly value is greatly diminished if it can’t be seen, and the canvas has mostly languished in storage for the last two decades, except for temporary displays at the Tate, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Rijksmuseum (the export ban applies only to permanent removal).

The arrangement with the Getty Museum is a new approach to institutional acquisitions: it’s the first time a national collection in the UK has bought a physical artwork in conjunction with a foreign gallery. Unlike the NPG, the Getty had no problem finding its half of the money – the Getty Foundation is the world’s largest single fund for the purchase and study of art – but it’s hard to reconcile letting Portrait of Ma'i spend half its time in Los Angeles with the arguments that were made for keeping it in Britain. (After the Getty deal was announced, there was no mention of national significance in the press release on the Art Fund’s website.) Hard cash, as so often in the fine art market, has triumphed over more rarefied values, but in this case that may be no bad thing.

The galleries’ shared ownership raises questions about what it means for a nation to own a work of art. Will the NPG still hold Portrait of Ma'i ‘in trust’ for the British public during its lengthy sojourns in Los Angeles? (It will make its first trip to California in time for the Olympics in 2028.) Would the British state be able to hold the Getty accountable for damage or loss? In the case of Reynolds’s paintingthe possible answers to these questions have implications for the way nations define, share or jealously guard what they consider to be their cultural heritage. But the answers also bear on the negotiations between, for example, the British Museum and institutional authorities in Nigeria over the Benin bronzes.

The National Portrait Gallery will reopen on 22 June after a three-year refurbishment project which aims to revamp the gallery’s public image as well as the building. New exhibits and layouts will foreground a more diverse Britain, and Portrait of Ma'i will undoubtedly be a highlight of the fresh perspective, though perhaps it is worth asking how much a painting can (or should) do to salvage the UK’s crumbling cultural consensus.