Britain’s National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday announced that it had raised tens of millions of pounds to help keep one of the country’s most celebrated paintings on public display.
The central London gallery said it had garnered £25 million ($31.2 million) of the £50 million required to jointly acquire Joshua Reynolds’s 1776 masterpiece Portrait of Mai (Omai).
Additional funding has come from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the Getty arts organisation in the United States.
Portrait of Mai (Omai) will feature in the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery after a three-year refurbishment ends on June 22 and be shown around the country.
It will also be exhibited “periodically” in the United States from 2026, the gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles said in a joint statement.
The life-sized study, which is regarded as one of Reynolds’s greatest works, depicts a Polynesian youth named Mai, also known as Omai.
He travelled from Tahiti to England with the explorer Captain James Cook and spent three years in London, where he met royalty and the intellectual elite before returning home in 1777.
National Portrait Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan called the portrait “by far the most significant acquisition” it has ever made.
The acquisition, after years in private ownership, is the first time it has been publicly owned.
Reynolds, whose 300th birth anniversary is celebrated this year, kept the painting in his London studio until his death in 1792.
It was acquired by a member of the British aristocracy until it was sold to a private collector in 2001 for just over £10 million at auction.
The British government had put an export bar on the painting to allow a UK buyer to match the price of buying it.
In March, the culture ministry said the painting was “inextricably linked to the great voyages of discovery and exploration”.
“It offers an important insight into the British reception, understanding, and representation of people from beyond Europe at that time in history,” it added.
Mai, depicted barefoot in a white turban and flowing robes, was regarded as an archetypal “noble savage” in 18th-century Britain, which at the time was expanding its global empire.
Modern Britain has in recent years been grappling with the legacy of its colonial history, in the wake of global anti-racism protests.
Reynolds, who inspired the French Impressionists of the 19th century, typically painted the 18th-century British elite.
Leading historians argued last year that acquiring Portrait of Mai could help Britain “to examine our past and understand who we are as a nation”.
Artist Antony Gormley said on Tuesday that Reynolds’s work “may well be the first time that the English establishment represented a member of a tribal society with dignity and respect”.