Art Review: Joshua Reynolds, Odilon Redon Exhibits at Getty Museum

From sea to shining sea, the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Adriatic. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about the Getty and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and Winslow Homer’s prints at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. I’ll also finish my series on the Biennale in Venice. A couple of months ago I got my first cortisone shot in my creaky, tender left knee, and since then I’ve been leaping from place to place like a gazelle.

The J. Paul Getty Museum is showing — for the first time — its Portrait of Mai, the magnificent full-length depiction of the young Polynesian grandee thought to be the first Polynesian to visit London. Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), London’s preeminent portraitist, painted it around 1776. Mai arrived as an exotic in 1774, in his early 20s, a guest on one of ships traveling with Captain Cook. He was aristocratic in blood and bearing, and by the time he left London, in 1776, he was a celebrity in high society. He’d traveled to London in search of English supporters and weapons for his efforts to retake his home island — Raiatea — from the evil occupying forces of Bora Bora. He died, alas, in 1780, in Tahiti in an English-style house that Cook’s crew had built for him, livin’ la vida English and easy.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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From sea to shining sea, the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Adriatic. Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about the Getty and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles and Winslow Homer’s prints at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. I’ll also finish my series on the Biennale in Venice. A couple of months ago I got my first cortisone shot in my creaky, tender left knee, and since then I’ve been leaping from place to place like a gazelle.

The J. Paul Getty Museum is showing — for the first time — its Portrait of Mai, the magnificent full-length depiction of the young Polynesian grandee thought to be the first Polynesian to visit London. Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), London’s preeminent portraitist, painted it around 1776. Mai arrived as an exotic in 1774, in his early 20s, a guest on one of ships traveling with Captain Cook. He was aristocratic in blood and bearing, and by the time he left London, in 1776, he was a celebrity in high society. He’d traveled to London in search of English supporters and weapons for his efforts to retake his home island — Raiatea — from the evil occupying forces of Bora Bora. He died, alas, in 1780, in Tahiti in an English-style house that Cook’s crew had built for him, livin’ la vida English and easy.