Why we don't need to spend £25m on Reynolds' 'Mai'

Joshua Reynolds, Omai, c.1776, private collection

Joshua Reynolds painted the Polynesian islander from Raiatea known as Omai in around 1776, when he was something of a celebrity in London. Mai (to give him his correct name) had arrived in Britain two years earlier, having hitched a ride on HMS Adventure, one of the ships from Cook's second expedition under the command of Tobias Furneaux. 

Mai had a dramatic backstory, which undoubtedly appealed to the British who befriended him both in the Pacific and in London. Born around 1751, the son of a landowner, he fled to Tahiti after his father was killed in a local dispute. He first encountered the British there in 1767 when the island was 'discovered' by HMS Dolphin during its second circumnavigation and seems to have been injured in a confrontation with the vessel. He was subsequently held captive on Borabora as part of the same dispute which had led to his father's death, before escaping to Huahine, where he met Furneaux and Cook. 

Mai was received in London as a star novelty. He was befriended by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, the botanist, both of whom he had met during Cook's first voyage; attracted celebrities like Samuel Johnson and Fanny Burney who both wrote about him; regularly attended meetings at the Royal Society and was introduced George III. He returned to Huahine in 1776, travelling with Cook's third voyage, which was popularised as a way of returning Mai to his homeland. He settled in some style on the island, living in a European-design house and attended by Maori servants, but only survived until 1779. 

William Parry, Omai, Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander, c.1775, 

Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby

Reynolds' portrait exploits the artist's established Grand Manner style to present Mai in non-Western dress, against a generalised 'exotic' landscape background in the very recognisable pose of the classical Apollo Belvedere. Despite the fact that Mai quickly adopted European clothes - a very short-sighted Samuel Johnson recalls not being able to distinguish him from other British visitors because his dress and manners were so Westernised - Reynolds' choses to emphasise his otherness but does so in a reassuring and non-specific way. The robes have been given a North African make-over, completed with the addition of a turban, to create what would have been for Reynolds' audience a more familiar version of Oriental garb. Only the subtly visible tattooing on Mai's hand and wrist gives an authenticity, easily missed in a eight foot canvas. Parry's portrait, which shows Mai with head bare, seems a more authentic representation, repeated by Nathaniel Dance, and indeed in Reynolds' own sketch.

 

Engraving after Nathaniel Dance, Omai, 1774, National Portrait Gallery

If Reynolds' interpretation is not an accurate reflection of Mai, the visitor who clearly embraced, and was embraced by, British culture, neither it is an accurate representation of the Polynesian who stepped off the Adventure. Instead he carefully repositions Mai as a 'noble savage', his exoticism contained within recognisable tropes of otherness. To a certain extent he was simply buying into the persona which Mai himself seems to have adopted by playing up his royal connections and social status. However, what the painting completely fails to convey is the ambivalence and complexity of Mai's reception in eighteenth century society. The British he met were intrigued and frequently admiring of him, yet they found him childlike and ignorant - his failure to master English was a source of humour. Equally there were bawdy rumours about his attractiveness to highborn women which suggests he was, in a limited sense, seen as sexually threatening.

Reynolds' painting is not the only one of Mai which we have. In 2002 Parry's portrait was saved for the nation after a join campaign by the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museums of Wales. Parry is a much less well known artist, perhaps, but as a record of Mai's visit and reception his painting stands comparison to Reynolds' version. In addition there are a number of prints which record his appearance. Equally, there are better examples of Reynolds' interaction with non-European subjects. His portrait of Huang Ya Dong painted around the same date for the duke of Dorset, shows the young man seated cross-legged and wearing Chinese dress. Huang had travelled to Britain  with a member of the East India Company which was trading in Canton, and was much in demand for his knowledge of oriental botany. Reynolds also painted a much copied portrait, possibly of Francis Barber, the freed Black slave who was servant to Samuel Johnson; possibly of  Reynolds' own Black servant who acted as a model in other portraits. The strikingly characterful, unfinished image stands in marked contrast to the anonymous sidelined images of Black attendants which often appear in Reynolds' portraiture of the British upper classes.

The portrait of Mai is a wonderful example of Joshua Reynolds' work, but it is only one of many such examples of his Grand Manner paintings in British collections. The subject is unusual but it is not unique, either in terms of images of the Polynesian, or in terms of Reynolds' representation of global majority subjects. £25 million could buy a number of interesting works by, and of, under-represented groups, and British collections are full of unheralded works which have stories to tell. We don't need this painting and spending such a vast amount of money on it simply reinforces the Old Master canon just at a time when galleries are finally starting to think outside the restrictions of that particular box. 

Lucy Kemp-Welch: A natural horsewoman

Lucy Kemp-Welch, Timber-Hauling in the New Forest, 1904, Bristol Art Gallery and Museum

I first came across Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869-1958) in Bristol, where her huge (over 3m across) canvas Timber-Hauling in the New Forest demands attention. Heavy horses strain uphill, dragging felled trunks through scrubby landscape, the hazy atmosphere and impressionistic handling suggesting both the vigour of the task and a certain elegiac nobility. Based on the scale and realism, an obvious comparison seemed Elizabeth Thompson, whose large military canvases had been wildly popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Rosa Bonheur, the mid century French Realist also produced monumental images of working animals, albeit more precisely rendered and often presented under dazzlingly-lit blues skies. And there were a host of popular Victorian painters of agricultural animals, regular Royal Academy exhibitors like Thomas Sidney Cooper (who worked on a smaller scale and in a more academic style) and Arnesby Brown’s sunny rural nostalgia. But for heroic power, movement and naturalism, Timber-Hauling was in a league of its own. 

Bournemouth-born Kemp Welch seems to have showed an early talent for animal drawing: she studied anatomy with a local vet, enrolled in the town's art school and exhibited her first work aged fourteen. In 1892, her mother, now widowed, moved to Bushey in Hertfordshire so that Lucy and her younger sister Edith could join Hubert von Herkomer's academy there. Herkomer, a colossus in the late Victorian art world, is a much less familiar name nowadays. Having started his career working for the illustrated press, he became an establishment portraitist, but continued to have an interest in 'condition of England' style realism. He dabbled in the French-influenced naturalism of New English Art Club painters like Alexander Stanhope Forbes, loosening his brushwork, but his colouration retained a mid-century sombreness. Herkomer’s heroic worker is clearly visible on the right in Kemp-Welch, the man’s pose even slightly echoing that of Hard Times. 

Kemp-Welch sent the first of sixty-one paintings, Gipsy Horse Drovers, to the Royal Academy in 1895. Just two years later Colt Hunting in the New Forest was critically acclaimed, purchased by the RA and given to the newly formed Tate collection. Kemp-Welch's signature style was established: large scale, working horses depicted in motion in a landscape setting with a loose naturalism. She did attempt to branch out. The late 1890s saw some unsuccessful history paintings (To Arms, Early Morning in the Camp of the Duke of York's Army before the Battle of the Roses at St Albans, 1898) and she experimented with imagined Boer War subjects. Later she would also produce The Riders (1910) based on a Robert Browning poem, a work which sits more comfortably with her illustrations for Black Beauty (1915) than with her large scale oils. She was primarily an observer who sketched from life obsessively and had a glass studio constructed to observe horses outside in all weathers. Arguably her greatest skill was to create characterful and individualised horses - rather like a less sentimental Landseer - so, for instance, Mixed Company at a Race Meeting (1904) becomes almost like an equine version of Thompson's Roll Call in which the everyday is elevated to status of hero.

Mixed Company at a race Meeting (1904) Bushey Museum and Art Gallery

In many ways, Kemp-Welch's life was as restrictive as her subject matter often appears. She never married and continued to live at Bushey with her sister until Edith died in 1941. She went abroad only twice and was content to make sketching tours within the UK each summer. Her career undoubtedly suffered because of her sex. Like Thompson, she failed in her attempt to become the first female Academician since the eighteenth century. However, she made the most of what was available to her. Wherever she travelled, she sketched and recorded what she saw, and many of the locations ended up in her finished oils. She was a founder member and first president of the short lived Society of Animal Painters, a clear attempt to elevate the status of her genre. She was one of the first women members of the Society of British Artists, and had a long and financially successful career.

She suffered discrimination most cruelly during the First World War. Despite her popular and influential recruiting poster Forward! Forward to Victory Enlist Now (1914) as a woman she was not allowed to travel to France as a war artist. She had to content herself with observing manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain and at Russley Park Remount Depot (for retraining horses). Ironically, she produced two of her most iconic works Forward the Guns (1917) and  Straw Ride (1919) during this period but it must have rankled that Alfred Munnings, a younger, lesser-known horse painter was commissioned by the Canadian government to paint on the Western Front and effectively launched a career which took him all the way to President of the RA, from his war paintings. 

Big Guns to the Front, 1918, National Museum of Wales

Kemp-Welch took over Herkomer's school when he retired in 1906, but with limited success. The school declined from 1914 and closed completely in the 1920s. Its failure perhaps reflected a general decline in Kemp-Welch's reputation and production. The horse was part of the past, increasingly relegated to circuses (which she painted regularly throughout the inter-wars years) and elite leisure (which she had always been less interested in), and by the time she exhibited her last major work The Call in 1937, she had to fake the horse-drawn lifeboat shown because it had been discontinued. 

Perhaps Lucy Kemp-Welch was born a generation too late. Her work has much in common with that of the Newlyn School, doing for the working horse what they did for fishing communities. The Harvesters (1898) has the romanticised rural realism and rich palette of George Clausen's scenes of agricultural workers. She was one of those hard to categorise 'British Impressionists' who  applied a loosened technique and plein air observation, but preferred to work up their subjects indoors, on a larger scale. It was a style which became rapidly obsolete in the early years of the twentieth century, and by the time of her death Kemp-Welch was a forgotten and unappreciated figure. A revival of interest in British Impressionism in the early 1990s seemed to largely ignore her, perhaps, dare I say because she was a woman, certainly because she had little contact with the established art colonies and exhibited at the Academy. Neither Tate Britain nor the Imperial War Museum currently have their examples on display. Hopefully a 2023 book and exhibition (at Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth) will kickstart interest in her work. 

 

    

'Hogarth's Britons': (Derby Museum and Art Gallery until June 4 2023)

William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley, c.1759, Foundling Museum, London

The mouthful of a title, Hogarth's Britons: Succession, Patriotism and the Jacobite Rebellion, suggests an admirable level of ambition from the curators at Derby. I'm not sure they achieve their aims, but this is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable romp of a show. The exhibition never really decides whether it is a gallery survey of Hogarth's art or a museum exploration of the Jacobite rebellions. One the one hand we have cardboard cutouts of soldiers, a Jacobite garter and other memorabilia; one the other we have random examples of Hogarth's work, like his Election series prints and Marriage a la Mode loaned from the National Gallery.  The Jacobite Rebellions are certainly worth an exhibition. There is local interest, certainly, with Derby having the dubious honour of being the southern-most town the Scottish troops reached in 1745. More importantly, the period is generally not well covered, and, unless you are a fan of the time-travelling drama Outlander, much of the information presented here is probably new and definitely interesting. The question is whether the art on display really fits the narrative.   

William Hogarth is a slippery character at the best of times. Last year the Tate failed to make the case that he was at heart a European in a huge exhibition which, if you took away the captions, was really a retrospective of his whole career. In Derby, we are presented with exactly the opposite argument: Hogarth as the patriot. Well, yes and no. Hogarth was gleefully anti-French but his caricaturist's eye gleefully attacked a lot of things, including the English establishment. Derby's other great coup, a loan of The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750) from the Foundling Museum, shows the English army going to give battle to the Jacobites in 1745, but the troops are represented in a fairly disreputable light. Although the background shows them as a disciplined, martialled force, the foreground focus is on drunkenness, debauchery and disease: certainly George II found nothing to recommend it. In the end Hogarth sent it to the King of Prussia.

Allan Ramsay, Charles Edward Stuart, c.1745, National Galleries of Scotland

Paradoxically, whilst the curators are keen to present Hogarth as a patriot, they are more reluctant to see Allan Ramsay as a Jacobite sympathiser, despite his newly discovered portrait of Charles Edward Stuart and his famous image of Flora Macdonald. Ultimately perhaps neither artist was highly politicised: both sought royal patronage (of any kind) and were arguably more concerned with furthering their own careers than with pursuing nationalist agendas. In the same way, the exhibition is perhaps best viewed not through a historical lens, but as a collection of fine mid-eighteenth century art. Ramsay is a portraitist of understated skill and delicacy, who too often gets ignored in the Gainsborough-Reynolds duopoly. Hogarth is fresh no matter how many times you see his work and Marriage a la Mode is beautifully displayed here, at a perfect height and lighting to take in all the tiny subtleties.

Derby Museum and Art Gallery is worth a visit any time for their wonderful collection of Joseph Wrights and it has the warm, embracing feel of a place which is valued and has had money spent on it. There's a new entrance, built in the 1960s but recently refurbished, a lovely cafe and Objects of Hope, Love and Fear, a sympathetically but lightly curated display of world objects. Sadly, taking a wrong turn on the ways to the toilets, I discovered the old entrance, chilly, empty and neglected and a locked display of Victorian-labelled objects, which had clearly suffered water damage. Some use surely could be found for these areas.

'From the Cornish Coast to the Malvern Hills' (Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum until July 1 2023): Creating the Wrong Impression

Stanhope Forbes, Lighting Up Time, c.1902, Bowerman Trust

Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery has a tiny two room exhibition space but they use it well. The current show From the Cornish Coast to the Malvern Hills: British Impressionism from the 19th and 20th century augments works from their own collection with loans from Southampton Art Gallery and the Bowerman Trust, whose works I'm not familiar with. The result is a satisfying range of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British art, ranging from high Victorian traditionalists like Benjamin Williams Leader through Newlyn School naturalism to Dod Procter and Walter Sicket. It's an eclectic selection - you might go so far as to call it random. So, there's something for everyone; which means inevitably that there'll be something which isn't for you. For my money, Laura Knight is not well served by the overly cute Young Girl Seated with her Dog or the problematically exoticised Beulah.

Walter Langley The Breadwinners, 1896 Bowerman Trust

Personal taste aside, the real issue is what this collection of paintings is actually trying to represent. The exhibition title suggests it is landscape based, which is largely but not exclusively the case. Why, for instance, is Sickert 's Old Soldier included? And then there is the thorny issue of British Impressionism. The wall text which opens the show, sets up a nice summary of French influence and plein airism, and the exhibition begins with a lovely early Camille Pissarro View from the Versailles Road, Louveciennes (1870) - although not one from his time in England. But both the text and that first painting create a false narrative: most of the work here could not even loosely be described as Impressionist. Looking at Charles Napier Hemy or Stanhope Forbes it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking their work less radical than, and perhaps inferior to, what was happening on France, whereas in reality these British artists were judging themselves by a very different set of criteria. Walter Langley was working firmly within a realist tradition giving status, dignity and academy space to the old, the poor and the socially marginalised. Forbes took his queue from the French naturalist style of Jules Bastien-Lepage: plein airism, but much less concerned with immediacy, light and movement than the Impressionists. Others were updating British landscape and seascape traditions. Calling these disparate painters 'impressionist' might guarantee people through the door, but it does the artists no favours and may well leave visitors feeling short-changed.

However, if you put semantics aside, there is plenty of art to enjoy. Forbes' Chadding on Mount's Bay (1902) has been voted the most popular work in Worcester's collection and it's easy to see why. It's a glorious nostalgia-fest, evoking the endless, sun-filled days of childhood, skillfully creating imagined narratives and character relationships, all painted with his French-style, sharp-focussed, square brush technique. His later work becomes increasingly impressionistic just at the time when Impressionism was becoming increasingly old-fashioned and takes on an empty jauntiness, rather like a railway poster (which he did design). At his best though, as in Lighting Up Time, Forbes evokes an epic Thomas Hardy-esque grandeur.

The best thing about this show is variety. Women artists are well represented, including Elizabeth Forbes. You have huge set pieces, like John Arnesby Brown's Herald of Night, and a tiny David Cox sketch. Charles Ginner's stylised and heavily painted view of the Malvern Hills with it's shiny flattened foreground takes the show firmly into the twentieth century. And yes, there is even some genuine Impressionism. It's a free show, by a gallery which consistently tries to do interesting and innovative exhibitions within a limited space, making the most of their limited collection and championing local artists and local scenery. So go, enjoy, but just don't get the wrong impression.