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.
Because she was Jewish, Klein and her husband, Felix, were forced to leave Austria in 1938 when it was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they survived the war in Monaco. Wienerroither and Kohlbacher said in a statement that the painting was being offered for sale “pursuant to a settlement agreement” between Klein’s heirs and the work’s current owners, who it also declined to name. The statement added that the Austrian authorities had granted the work an export license.
The gallery had originally intended to show the Klimt at last year’s TEFAF Maastricht, but withdrew it before the event’s opening.
“There were issues with the contract, and we had to make sure there were no other heirs with a claim on the painting,” Wienerroither said. “Percentages are always a question,” he added, referring to the potentially contentious issue of dividing the proceeds of a restitution sale between claimants. “It needed time.”
Experts say that the painting, made in the year that Klimt and other forward-looking artists formed the Vienna Succession group, represents a significant moment in the artist’s career.
“The portrait of the Ghanaian prince marks the transition to a new stage in his artistic development,” Weidinger, the Klimt scholar, said in an email. “It anticipates key elements of his later portraiture. In particular, the use of symbolic floral motifs in the background establishes a stylistic principle that Klimt would develop consistently from this point onward.”
Similar symbolic floral motifs characterize the background of an enigmatic, long-lost 1917 portrait of a young woman that sold for $37 million at auction in Vienna last April.
Klimt is one of the most admired and coveted of all modern artists and auction prices for his work have recently climbed as high as $104.3 million. Wienerroither and Kohlbacher’s more modest price tag reflects that this latest Klimt painting to appear for sale is a relatively small, unsigned early work lacking the decorative sumptuousness of the artist’s later works.
“It’s the only Klimt painting on the market and it’s a key work,” Wienerroither said.
