Image: Portrait of Mai (“Omai”), about 1776, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Oil on canvas. Purchased jointly by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Board of Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2023. Support provided to NPG by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund and other generous supporters. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London
Getty will mark the US debut of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Portrait of Mai’ with a free public conversation at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on Sunday, 20 September 2026, at 4 p.m. The talk runs approximately one hour in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium and is also streamed online.
Author and historian Hampton Sides joins Richard Rand, associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, to discuss Reynolds’s making of the full-length oil portrait, Mai’s time in England from 1774 to 1776, and his return voyage to Tahiti on Captain James Cook’s final voyage. Getty describes Mai as the first Polynesian to visit England.
The painting, identified by Getty as ‘Portrait of Mai (“Omai”)’ and dated to about 1776, was purchased jointly in 2023 by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Board of Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Support for the National Portrait Gallery’s share came from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund and other supporters, and the shared ownership ties the work to both Los Angeles and London.
The portrait itself goes on view at the Getty Center in the Collection Highlights presentation ‘Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Mai and 18th-Century Portraiture’, which runs from 15 September 2026 to 14 March 2027 — five days before the talk.
Tickets for the conversation are free but required, and double as the holder’s Getty Center entrance reservation; parking is charged separately. Online viewers register through Zoom. In-person attendees can join a book signing with Sides afterwards, with his 2024 book ‘The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook’ on sale before and after the program. Getty also notes that Sides’s novella-length account of Mai, ‘The Exotic’, is due in September as an ebook and audiobook.
