British art, Pacific subjects, Contemporary values

A public lecture and following workshop, convened by Prof. Kate Fullagar. In March 2023 the longstanding battle for ownership of Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai (1775) was resolved. After more than two decades of struggle to retain the work in public British hands for its “historical significance”, it was bought by a consortium of art foundations, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty Trust. It will now spend equal time in London and Los Angeles, securing reasonable access to the work, though marring original efforts to keep it solely in Britain. The purchase price of £50 million was by far the highest price paid for a British work of art, the result of ever-rising hype around the work since its sale in 2001 to a private buyer for £10.3 million.

On 17 October Peter Brunt (Samoan heritage), Associate Professor of Art History at Victoria University Wellington, will deliver a public lecture on 17 October on "Turning British Art on its Head."

This keynote will address the three themes of the workshop — British Art, Pacific Subjects, and Contemporary Values — with the aim of turning them on their heads. What is “British art” in the wake of Cook’s voyages to the South, for example? Was British art not changed irrevocably by those encounters, as Bernard Smith argued decades ago? And what are “Pacific subjects”? Or to put the question another way, who are Pacific subjects? What if we took “subjects” to mean, rather, Pacific subjectivities? Who, for instance, was Mai, the “subject” of Joshua Reynolds’ famous portrait? And who did he become as a consequence of his journey to the North? Finally, what are “contemporary values” when, for many Indigenous artists today, their values are informed by the values of their ancestral pasts?

On 18 October he will join a workshop of nine other speakers giving short papers on similar themes. The workshop will centre the topic that has been largely ignored in the twenty-year debate about the value of Reynolds’ Mai, which is the role of Mai himself, and of the Pacific zone, in British history. It will explore how and why Mai’s Tahitian archipelagic homelands have been neglected in modern discussions, and what a focus on them now suggests about British culture, Pacific agency, and the course of empire.

A preliminary schedule is as follows: 

18 October 2024, 9.30am-3.30pm, Short talks and reflections, Roland Wilson Building, ANU

9.30am-10.00: Introduction

Kate Fullagar and Zoomed remarks from Getty Director of Collections, Richard Rand

10.00-11.00: Session one: Perspectives from the Pacific, 

Mirama Bono, ‘Tupaia, Mai and Ahutoru , the legacy of our tupuna’

Pauline Reynoldsw, 'Encountering Mai in the gallery: replicating the fit’

11.00-11.30 – morning tea

11.30-12.45pm – Session two: Reynolds’ Mai Portrait and Imperial Visual Culture, Chair: Robert Wellington

Jos Hackforth-Jones, ‘Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai:  The model gentleman and identity politics’

Peter McNeil, ‘‘‘How much more Nature can do without art, than art with all her refinement, unassisted by Nature’: ‘Mai and Pacifica images in late 18th-century England'

Carl Vail, ‘Refiguring difference in Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai and Daniel Boyd’s Untitled (RMUFWM)’

12.45pm-1.30pm – lunch

1.30pm-2.45pm: Session three: The Pacific and British Enlightenment, Chair: Peter Brunt

Monica Anke Hahn, ‘The Materiality of the Encounter: Pacific Play and Resistance at Home’

Bruce Buchan, ‘Picturing Pacific Peoples: Race, Instructions, and the Colonial Enlightenment, 1785-1800’

Lara Nicholls, ‘Sarah Stone Painting at the Holophusicon: displaying the Pacific in Enlightenment Britain’

2.45pm-3.30pm. Final Reflections, Chair: Robert Wellington

Peter Brunt & Kate Fullagar