Clocking Mai: A Study of Time in Reynolds’ Polynesian Portrait

Considering the new temporal contexts of Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai, jointly owned by institutions on different sides of the world, how does time appear in the painting? How might time have appeared to its contemporary viewers, including Mai? The case is made that, in the portrayal of the figure, Reynolds’ painting engages in a historical methodology whose arguments are grounded on the denial of the coeval presence of non-European people. The notion of temporal division takes on an alternative form in the depiction of the landscape, which, drawing on contemporary writings by natural historians, leads ultimately to a sense of human marginality correlative to geological time. A very different relationship between the subject and the landscape is revealed when considering the painting through Polynesian concepts of time, bringing to bear, in particular, the enduring coexistence between the ahistorical time–space of the po and the earthly temporality of the ao.