One of the earliest portraits of a person of color by a British artist will remain on public display after London’s National Portrait Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles struck a 50 million-pound ($62 million) deal to buy it.
The two institutions announced Wednesday they had each pitched in 25 million pounds to acquire Joshua Reynolds’ depiction of an 18th-century Polynesian man, “Portrait of Mai.” The seven-foot high (2.1-meter) painting is considered a masterpiece by the renowned portrait artist and is the first known grand depiction of a nonwhite subject in British art.
