This Dusty Painting Turned Out to Be Gustav Klimt’s Long-Lost Portrait of an African Prince
Experts think the renowned Austrian Symbolist painted the artwork in 1897. An art gallery in Vienna has priced it at $16 million
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Several years ago, the owners of an old, dusty painting walked into an art gallery in Vienna. They presented experts with a photograph of the work, claiming that it had been painted by Gustav Klimt, the famed Austrian Symbolist. A young gallery assistant dismissed them.
“It was not imaginable that this was a Klimt; it was very dirty,” Lui Wienerroither, co-owner of the gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, tells the Washington Post’s Victoria Craw.
But the team, wanting to be sure, decided to investigate. Co-owner Ebi Kohlbacher found the couple at a nearby coffee shop, and Wienerroither called the art historian Alfred Weidinger.
The painting, which depicts an African prince, turned out to be a genuine Klimt. Now, the piece is on display at TEFAF Maastricht, an art fair in the Netherlands, where it’s expected to sell for over $16 million.
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Born in 1862, Klimt founded the Vienna Secession movement, a school of painting that rejected Austrian academic standards. Klimt is famous for his use of gold leaf in paintings such as The Kiss (1908), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901).
Though unsigned, the two-foot-tall portrait is stamped with a symbol indicating that it’s “almost certainly from the estate of Gustav Klimt,” as Weidinger says in a statement, per the Washington Post. The artwork had been auctioned off in 1923—five years after Klimt’s death—before changing hands several times. Since the 1950s, it’s been part of a private collection.
Weidinger identified the painting as Klimt’s portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, a leader of the Osu tribe in modern-day Ghana. As Artnet’s Brian Boucher reports, Klimt painted the prince in 1897 after a visit to Vienna’s Tiergarten am Schüttel, a zoo that sometimes also staged exhibitions of people.
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With his friend, artist Franz Matsch, Klimt observed a “display” of the prince and some 120 members of his tribe. This group had made the 53-day journey to Vienna to participate in a “Völkerschau,” a kind of exploitative ethnographic exhibition popular in Europe in the 1800s and 1900s. For some six months in Vienna, they were observed by about 10,000 people per day.
“These people were dehumanized in these exhibitions,” Marie Rodet, a historian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, tells the Washington Post. “They were used and exploited, and in a context in which actually it was almost about affirming the superiority of the white race over the rest of the world.”
After the exhibition, both Klimt and Matsch painted the prince. Weidinger thinks that a patron had commissioned both artists but ultimately chose Matsch’s version, which explains why Klimt’s is unsigned, per Artnet. While Matsch depicted the prince head-on against a solid green background, Klimt painted him from the side against a floral backdrop.
Flowers were a common motif in Klimt’s early work, such as Portrait of Sonja Knips (1898), when he was honing his decorative style, according to Wienerroither. The artist would paint The Kiss about a decade later.
In recent years, Klimt paintings have fetched astonishing sums at auctions. His long-lost Portrait of Miss Lieser (1917) sold for $32 million in 2024, while Lady With a Fan (1917–18) sold for more than $108 million in 2023. Wienerroither tells the Washington Post that $16 million is a “very reasonable” price for the prince’s portrait.
“Klimt gives him such a dignity and warmth,” Wienerroither adds. “It is touching, because you feel this is a person you know.”
