National Museums & Galleries of Wales, Captain Cook Memorial Museum, and National Portrait Gallery join forces to acquire an outstanding painting
Portrait Of Omai, Joseph Banks And Dr Daniel Solander (c. 1775-6)
by William Parry, 59 x 59 (1500 x 1500mm)

The National Museums & Galleries of Wales (NMGW), the Captain Cook Memorial Museum and the National Portrait Gallery are delighted to announce that they have jointly acquired William Parry’s group portrait of Sir Joseph Banks, Dr Daniel Solander and the Tahitian Omai following a successful fund-raising campaign.
A work of outstanding significance to heritage and cultural life of Wales and Britain, the painting received a temporary export bar in March 2002. Neither the consortium nor an overseas institution were able to raise the 1.8 million needed and the portrait was subsequently offered to the National Museums & Galleries of Wales, the Captain Cook Memorial Museum and the National Portrait Gallery at a much reduced purchase price of £950,000.
NMGW contributed £100,000 from their specimen purchase grant and the painting will be on display at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff between December 2003 and March 2004 and will be on show at the Captain Cook Memorial Museum from April 2004 for several years, before returning to Wales on a rota basis.
The portrait was saved with the generous support of £155,000 from the National Art Collections Fund and of many individual donors in Wales, London, and the North-East of England.
William Parry (l742–l791) was a portrait and history painter. He trained and worked both in London and Italy, while retaining a professional practice in Wales. Parry was the son of John Parry (c. l710 –1782) of Ruabon, the ‘Blind Harpist’ who published the earliest collection of traditional Welsh airs. William Parry became a pupil of Reynolds in l766 and remained a life-long associate.
In l770, with the support of Wales’ most influential and wealthy patron, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (1749-89) of Wynnstay, Parry travelled to Italy. He returned in 1775, and shortly afterwards began work on this group portrait possibly as a result of rekindling his acquaintance with Reynolds who was then also painting Omai.
Omai, Joseph Banks and Dr Daniel Solander may have been acquired from the artist by the Vaughan family of Nannau, near Dolgellau, to whom it belonged by the 1830s, and it was shown at the National Museum in 1948.
Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and the Swedish botanist Dr Daniel Carl Solander (1736-82) were two of eighteenth-century Britain’s leading scientists. They were life-long collaborators and had travelled together on Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific in 1768.
Omai (c.1753-1776/7), who had chosen to travel to Britain after making friends with crew members of the Adventure, was put into Banks and Solander’s care after his arrival in 1774. Having studied Tahiti’s language and culture, Banks and Solander could communicate with Omai and help ease his transition in to European life. Banks was an entrepreneur and a socialite who understood how to fuel public excitement. He presented Omai to George III, took him to the theatre and the races, and introduced him into aristocratic, intellectual and fashionable society.
Combining personal charm and personifying the ‘natural man’ of Rousseau’s writings, Omai had a lasting impact on the popular imagination of eighteenth-century Britain. His engaging character and reputation as a romantic figure was perpetuated in drama, poetry and the memoirs of Samuel Johnson, Fanny Burney, Horace Walpole and others.
Parry’s group portrait is the only work to represent the Tahitian as an equal among the company in which he rose to fame. With its scale, composition and grand manner setting, this painting celebrates the collaborative nature of scientific research during the eighteenth century. Painted in an era when Britain was on the brink of considerable colonial, intellectual and commercial expansion, this painting captures Britain’s desire for knowledge of these new territories and their cultures.
Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at the National Museums & Galleries of Wales, said: “This picture is Parry's best-known work. It encapsulates the intellectual excitement of the 1770s, itself strongly felt in Wales, which was soon to transform our national life, and is a wonderful acquisition for a museum whose collections include both the arts and the sciences. We are delighted to have acquired it in partnership with the Captain Cook Memorial Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, enabling it to be seen periodically in Cardiff in the context of works by William Parry and his contemporaries’’. For further information and transparencies please contact:
Julie Richards, Press Officer,
National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff.
Tel 029 2057 3185
Email Julie.Richards@nmgw.ac.uk