The author of this biographical study promises the “braiding” of three lives but does not quite deliver. The book is more like three lines, two of which intersect with a third but not with each other. The three lives in question are those of Ostenaco (also called Scyacust Ukah), a Cherokee leader who came to London on a diplomatic mission for his people; Mai, a Polynesian who sought to obtain arms in Britain for revenge against other Polynesians who had invaded his home island; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who at different times painted the two “exotic” visitors. It is a pity that the only color illustrations in the book are details of the portraits of the three protagonists on the book’s front cover. Yale usually stumps up for more than black and white, and could have done much better here. At least there are some reproductions of drawings not usually seen.Mai is perhaps better known as Omai, although we do not find out until page 189 that the more usual form of his name perpetuates an eighteenth-century error. We are told early on, however, that Mai was not from Tahiti, as has been assumed, but from the neighbouring island of Ra‘iatea. The portraits of the Cherokee and the Ra‘iatean now languish in limbo: Ostenaco in storage at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa (although it can be viewed in the museum’s online collection), Mai under export bar and ongoing litigation after its sale in 2002 to a purchaser outside the United Kingdom. Perhaps this book may lure the one out of hiding and prompt a resolution to the dispute over the other.The accounts of the lives of Ostenaco and Mai are lively and informative, and Fullagar’s interpretation of the portrait of the latter is astute. “Mai emerges as an everyman from everywhere,” Europeanized but also Oriental, Pacific, Roman, even Arab. Why did Reynolds withdraw the portrait of Ostenaco from public view and keep it in storage? No convincing answer is given, although it could simply be that it is not a very impressive picture, painted relatively early in the artist’s career. The sitter looks rather pudgy and smug, unlike the handsome and idealized Mai in flowing white robes against a dramatic sky. The portrait of Mai also remained in Reynolds’s studio, on display to clients but unsold until the artist’s death. Perhaps London buyers were uninterested in Indigenous subjects. Fullagar might have explored the reception of portraits of similar subjects. Reynolds painted Wang-Y-Tong, a Chinese visitor, in 1776. Africans appear as attendant figures in a number of portraits and there is the stand-alone representation of the man traditionally identified as Johnson’s servant Francis Barber, as Fullagar notes, but what did eighteenth-century Britons make of these representations of “the other”?It is usually the Indigenous figures in histories like this who lack voices, because their words were recorded by Europeans who heard and saw things from their own perspective or were not recorded at all, but here Reynolds is also strangely mute. The Discourses are quoted, and Reynolds’s letters here and there, but there is very little from the man himself. We are told repeatedly that Reynolds was torn politically between his two closest friends, Johnson the Tory and Burke the Whig, which resulted in the artist’s “mixed views on empire,” his “fundamental ambivalence about Britain’s imperial direction.” No actual evidence is cited for this supposed ideological conflict, but once Fullagar attributes it to Reynolds, she runs with it: “As ever, Reynolds was shifting to maintain his double position on the volatile political spectrum of his age.” Fullagar’s interpretation of Reynolds’s views of empire is certainly a possibility, but it is not the only one and nothing is offered to corroborate it. It is also possible that Reynolds may have leaned one way or another politically, but not have expressed a view in public. He may have agreed with different camps on different issues. He may have adopted a considered neutrality in order not to offend patrons and friends. Or he may have been indifferent to politics and questions of empire. Reynolds’s pupil and early (1813) biographer, James Northcote, certainly thought that “politics never amused him nor ever employed his thoughts for a moment.” In the absence of firsthand evidence, we do not know—but Fullagar nevertheless presents speculation as fact. Later in the book, Fullagar alludes to an eyewitness account that Mai was disappointed with the house built for him on his return to the South Seas. In Fullagar’s rendition, this becomes “No! No! No! This is not what he’d imagined at all.” This is not history or biography: it is historical fiction.Another small example of projection is Fullagar’s description of the crown jewels in London as “sourced from British plunders around the world.” This might be accurate in relation to what is currently on display in the Tower, where there are stones from colonial ventures in India and South Africa dating from the later eighteenth century onward. The regalia in existence in the early 1760s were, however, the pre-imperial version assembled by Charles II at the Restoration to replicate what had been melted down or sold off by his parents and by Cromwell. They were not the result of conquest, but of purchase (and, at coronations, rentals for added sparkle). “Plunders” may sound better in a book about Empire, but it is not correct.As Fullagar herself acknowledges, “biography’s impositions are perhaps not an exclusively Indigenous issue.”