The fate of Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai, one of the greatest British portraits ever painted and the country’s first grand portrayal of a non-white subject, hangs in the balance. If this astonishing work is lost abroad – as it may well be – once a government-imposed export bar runs out next month, it will leave more than an empty space on the wall of the National Portrait Gallery, which is running a last-ditch fundraising campaign to acquire it.
It will also expose the 70-year-old system intended to save art and cultural objects for the nation as unfit for purpose, able to define “national treasures” but unable or unwilling to fight to keep them here.
