Long-Lost Klimt Portrays African Prince

A rediscovered painting of an African prince by Gustav Klimt that captured visitors’ attention at the TEFAF Maastricht fair in the Netherlands is under negotiation for sale, the Vienna-based gallery offering the work said as the event closed on Thursday evening.

The early, almost photorealistic head-and-shoulders portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, shown against a floral background, had been on display at the booth of Wienerroither and Kohlbacher, priced at 15 million euros, or about $16.4 million.

“We are in active negotiations with a major museum,” said Lui Wienerroither, the gallery’s co-founder, though he declined to name the institution. Unlike at contemporary art fairs, high-value sales at TEFAF Maastricht, which specializes in older art, are often finalized after the event to allow buyers time to investigate questions of provenance or attribution. “Processes of due diligence have to be followed,” Wienerroither said.

The man depicted in this 26 inch-high painting was a member of a group of Africans from the Gold Coast (a former British colony now known as Ghana) who were live exhibits in colonial “human zoos” that toured Europe at the end of the 19th century. In the summer of 1896, they were put on display in a mock-African village in Vienna’s Zoological Garden, where Klimt might have seen them. The highly popular show, which attracted 5,000-6,000 visitors a day, was vividly evoked by the contemporary Austrian writer Peter Altenberg in his novel, “Ashantee.”

Wienerroither and Kohlbacher says Klimt’s painting came to light in 2023 when an Austrian couple brought the unsigned work, crudely framed and in a grimy condition at the time, into the gallery. The dealers say they discovered a barely legible Gustav Klimt estate stamp on the back of the canvas and confirmed with Alfred Weidinger, the author of a definitive catalog of Klimt’s works, that Klimt was known to have painted a portrait of a prince of the Osu people in what is now Ghana, though the painting’s whereabouts had been unknown for many years.

Subsequent research revealed that the painting was still in Klimt’s possession when he died in 1918 and was sold by auction from his estate in 1923. Five years later, it was listed among the works in a Klimt memorial exhibition in Vienna, on loan from a local collector, Ernestine Klein.