Americans can now see a famous portrait of the Pacific Islander who captivated 18th-century England for the first time

Joshua Reynolds' 1776 portrait of Mai, a young man from Raiatea who traveled to England aboard Captain Cook's second expedition, has arrived at the Getty Center in Los Angeles after the museum and London's National Portrait Gallery jointly bought it for $61 million. Mai was a commoner who had lost his family's status to invaders and arrived in England as what amounted to a curiosity for Joseph Banks and other gentleman naturalists fascinated by Rousseau's theories about 'noble savages.' The ship's crew dressed him up, rebranded him a priest, and let London society believe it was meeting royalty.

Mai, for his part, had his own agenda: he wanted British weapons to retake his homeland from Bora Bora's conquerors. The painting itself monumentalizes him at nearly eight feet tall, borrowing the visual grammar reserved for European nobility to dress up a story Europeans wanted to tell about distant lands and the people who lived there.

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