The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar (review)

Scholars once separated the history of eighteenth-century Britain from that of its colonies, placing each in its own silo and paying relatively little attention to the linkages connecting them. This book argues in favor of connections. In an "experiment in New Biography," Kate Fullagar yokes the lives of three very different men to a meditation on what she calls "the moral legacy of empire" (p. 5). The three men are the Cherokee warrior-diplomat Ostenaco, who traveled to Britain in 1762; Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist who painted his likeness during the visit; and Mai, from the Pacific island of Ra'iatea, who went to Britain in 1774 and stayed two years, during which time he, too, was painted by Reynolds. Other than the fact of these two portraits, there is little that explicitly joins these figures, but in telling their stories, Fullagar hopes to capture the possibilities, limits, contradictions, and ambivalence inherent in Great Britain's far-flung, loose-knit, and often shambolic imperial undertakings.

Ostenaco crossed the Atlantic in a fraught era of Cherokee history. His visit to London came on the heels of Cherokee participation in the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War and the destructive Anglo-Cherokee war that punctuated its conclusion, and he returned to his Overhills community in a time of deteriorating relations that culminated in the American War of Independence. After serving for more than a decade as a leading voice in the effort to preserve peace with the neighboring colonies through accommodation and concession, Fullagar argues that—as an aging and increasingly irrelevant figure in the turbulent politics of the Cherokee communities—

Ostenaco withdrew from his public role, moved west to the new Cherokee settlements near Chickamauga Creek, and accepted the aggressively defiant leadership that led those communities into the era of the American Revolution. Ostenaco's death is not marked in the surviving documentary record, but Fullagar suggests that he died, as he lived, supporting the interests of Cherokee culture and values.

Reynolds, a decade younger than Ostenaco, apprenticed as a portrait painter and gradually rose to prominence in London as a result of hard work and the patronage of well-placed clients. His early portraits focused on imperial figures like the naval officer Augustus Keppel. Fullagar emphasizes two strains in Reynolds's thinking: first, a conservative neoclassicism that defined his artistic principles; and second, an ambivalence toward empire that was exemplified in his close friendships with both Samuel Johnson, an anti-imperial Tory, and Edmund Burke, a pro-imperial Whig. He was able to balance those friendships, and the values they implied, through his diffident affability, which made Reynolds eminently likeable but also hard to pin down. The book turns on the two portraits at its center: one of Ostenaco, which Fullagar characterizes as a failure and which Reynolds never displayed or sold, the other of Mai, which worked because it abstracted Mai's specific qualities into a more universal, less particularized depiction. This was in keeping with a set of principles Reynolds articulated in a 1776 speech to the Royal Academy of Arts, a body he served as president for more than two decades, in which he discussed and compared the two paintings.

Mai—a full two generations younger than Ostenaco—came of age on Ra'iatea at about the same time that it fell to enemies from neighboring Bora Bora and became a dependency. Mai's father was killed, his relatives lost their land, and he ended up in a refugee community on Tahiti. When James Cook visited that island on his second Pacific voyage in 1773, Mai sailed back to London on the Adventure as an able seaman. During the course of a prolonged stay in England, Mai nurtured a plan to return to Ra'iatea with the support of British arms to defeat the Bora Borans and repatriate his home...