![]() ![]() Though he was wounded by a British cannon in his first encounter with Europeans, Omai was keen to voyage to Britain on the HMS Adventure, one of the ships accompanying Captain Cook’s Endeavour, to raise arms to fight the Bora Borans. After a series of skirmishes, Mai escaped to the nearby Tahiti just around the time British expeditions were investigating and claiming the islands in competition with the French. Born in Raiatea in the Polynesia Society Islands (still French today), a highly stratified society in which the ruling class were regarded as descendants of gods, he was the son of a mid-ranking courtier who was killed when the neighbouring Bora Borans attacked. In 1774, a Polynesian in his early 20s named Omai, or Mai to give him his real name, arrived in London, only the second Polynesian to visit Europe. Deaf in one ear and instantly recognisable thanks to his ever-present ear trumpet, he was knighted, became first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and Principal Painter in Ordinary to George III, a position that he first demanded and then complained that the “royal ratcatcher” was a better job: “If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it.” He was irritated by the clumsy king (“I think a certain person is not worth speaking to, nor speaking of”) and, like his friend Burke, was first excited by the promise, then alarmed by the violence, of the French Revolution.ĭefiant and proud … Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds. ![]() Reynolds never married (his sexual orientation remains a mystery) but lived with his sister. Friends with Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, they together formed a dining society of luminaries, The Club, that met in Soho’s Turk’s Head pub their Latin toast, devised by the artist himself, was Esto perpetua – “Let it be perpetual”. A West Country headmaster’s son who never lost his Devonshire accent, he depicted so many of the grandees of his time that he would sometimes welcoming five sitters a day. Back in the mid-1750s, Reynolds was the star portraitist in a country coursing with the surging energies and radical aspirations of the industrial revolution.
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