Given his undisputed central place in the history of British art, it is surprising that the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joshua Reynolds is not being celebrated this year with more éclat. The principal tribute will be an exhibition Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration (24 June – 29 October 2023) at the Box in Plymouth, the city where Reynolds made his reputation – he was born on 16th July 1723 at Plympton, on its outskirts. The exhibition will explore the patronage he enjoyed from the Eliot family of Port Eliot, St Germans, and will be supplemented by the museum’s collection of paintings by Reynolds, the largest outside London. 

Reynolds’s reputation rests largely on his portraits, so it might have been expected that the museum that contains the largest number, the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG), would have marked the occasion with an exhibition of its own, but given that it has been closed for the past three years for a comprehensive redevelopment and redisplay, due to be unveiled on 22nd June, it has had other priorities. Yet any disappointment that the NPG is neglecting Reynolds in his anniversary year was allayed by the announcement last August that it is seeking to raise £50 million to acquire one of his greatest paintings, the full-length portrait of Omai, the first Polynesian to visit Britain. Universally praised ever since it was first seen in public, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1776, it is a work both of great beauty and of compelling historic interest as a document of the earliest European encounter with Pacific cultures. The NPG’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, and his colleagues deserve high praise for so courageously pursuing a painting that for more than twenty years has frustratingly eluded every attempt to secure it for public ownership. 

Given the length of this saga, a résumé may be helpful. Having remained in Reynolds’s studio when he died in 1792, Omai was purchased at auction in 1796 by Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle, and it remained at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, until being despatched to Sotheby’s in 2002, after an attempt by Tate to purchase it (for £5.5 million) had failed. The portrait was sold for £10.3 million to a dealer on behalf of a Swiss company owned by the Irish businessman John Magnier. An application in 2002 for an export licence, at a valuation of £12.5 million, was deferred by the Secretary of State on the recommendation of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, to allow time for a United Kingdom institution to raise the funds to buy it. Unusually, the period of deferment was set at nine months rather than the usual six because Magnier refused to allow it to be publicly exhibited during that period. 

Tate’s fundraising was brought to an abrupt but joyful end when an anonymous private benefactor offered the full amount. The rejoicing did not last long, since Magnier refused to sell it. In 2005 he lent the painting to the Tate Britain exhibition Joshua Reynolds: Creator of Celebrity and subsequently it was granted a temporary export licence, for six years, on the understanding that it would be put on show for that period in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; in Ireland at that time a work of art that had been on public display for at least six years was exempted from capital gains tax when sold. At the end of that period the Secretary of State refused to extend the temporary licence and the painting was returned to storage in the United Kingdom, making a brief public reappearance in 2015, when it was lent to an exhibition, High Society, at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. A further application for an export licence was made in 2020, but the case did not come before the Reviewing Committee until March 2022, which recommended a deferral until August. At that point the NPG announced an intention to raise the funds to acquire Omai, as a result of which the deferral period was extended to 10th March 2023. As we go to press, the NPG has raised half of that sum, helped by some exceptional donations, including a provisional £10 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and £2.5 million from the Art Fund, the largest grant it has ever made for a museum acquisition. 

Everything about Omai is exceptional, including the fact it is the most highly valued work of art that has ever been export-stopped (although it is matched by a £50 million Picasso, Child with a dove, stopped in 2012, and now in Qatar). It painfully brings into question once more the system for export controls over works of art of national significance. One principal failing that the history of Omai emphasises, that an owner is under no obligation to accept a matching offer for a work of art that has been export-stopped, has been addressed by the introduction of a mechanism whereby, if a serious expression of interest is made at the end of the first deferral period, the owner – if they agree to proceed – is obliged to grant the prospective purchaser a legally binding option agreement.1 Unfortunately, Omai does not qualify for this arrangement, which applies only to export applications made on or after 1st January 2021. 

In 2021–22 only three of the fifteen objects that had export licences deferred were acquired for the United Kingdom. These represented less than two per cent of the total value of the deferred items, which amounted to £114 million, of which £50 million is accounted for by Omai. What can be done? It is often forgotten that, in cases where the owner rejected a matching offer, the Reviewing Committee used to refuse to hear any further application for ten years, leaving many items in effect under an indefinite stop. This practice ended in 1986, when the Government decided that it was an unreasonable interference with private property rights. Is this really such an overriding concern in the case of a work of art of the highest national significance? 

One appealing compromise might be for the Secretary of State to declare that an export licence will be refused in perpetuity if the owner does not grant an option agreement or accept a matching offer. This would give the system a useful stick to encourage the acceptance of such an offer, not least because if the owner chose instead to sell the work they would have to pay capital gains tax whether or not they were domiciled in the United Kingdom. But finally the question must be asked if, especially given its complexity and cost, the system is fit for purpose if it saves only a tiny handful of works every year? There is a mounting feeling that it has outlasted its usefulness and that the country would do better to follow the United States and drop export controls so that museums would be incentivised to acquire works from their original owner, either by private sale or at auction, which – as the tale of Omai emphasises – is almost always the least costly solution. 

 [1] See ‘Editorial: ‘Going, going, gone’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 163 (2021), p.995.