round the same time that Daniel Boyd’s exhibition ) opened at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, marking the multidisciplinary artist’s most comprehensive solo show in Europe, a news story about London’s National Portrait Gallery’s last-ditch efforts to prevent a painting by Joshua Reynolds from going into private hands was making headlines. Described as “one of the most important portraits in the history of British art,” Reynolds’s 1774 – now renamed , to reflect the subject’s correct name – shows Mai, the first Polynesian man to visit Britain. He travelled from Tahiti to England as “both spiritually breathtaking and, as the country’s first grand portrayal of a non-white subject, culturally important.” (Remaining on public display, the work was jointly bought by the UK’s National Portrait Gallery and the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from its owner for £50 million.)
