An early painting by the famed Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, thought lost since the 1930s, is on view for the first time since its recent rediscovery. The portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona — a representative of the Ga people in West Africa, in what is Ghana today — was painted in 1897 and depicts the prince in profile against loose brushstrokes of florals. Just over 2 feet tall, the small portrait is on display by the Viennese gallery Wienerroither & Kohlbacher (W&K) at the art fair TEFAF Maastricht in the Netherlands, with a price tag of €15 million (about $16.3 million).
The framed painting was “heavily soiled” with a “barely visible” estate stamp by Klimt when two collectors contacted W&K gallery with the artwork in 2023, according to a press release by the gallery. The gallery confirmed its authenticity with art historian Alfred Weidinger, who had been searching for the work for two decades.
According to the press release, the portrait was auctioned from Klimt’s estate in 1923 and loaned to an exhibition in 1928 by Ernestine Klein, who had converted the artist’s studio into a villa with her husband, Felix. The Jewish couple fled Vienna in 1938 to Monaco, just before World War II, but the painting’s whereabouts until 2023 remained a mystery. Following extensive restoration efforts and a restitution settlement with Klein’s heirs, the artwork is now making its reappearance in public.
W&K says the artist painted the work during the Vienna Völkerschau of 1897; Völkerschau exhibitions were colonialist-era ethnographic displays of people popularized in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Weidinger’s research into the exhibition found that a number of people from Osu, where the prince was from, traveled to Vienna to be exhibited, and that Klimt’s portrait was likely a commission but ultimately remained with the artist, Artnet reported.
The 1897 portrait represents Klimt’s stylistic shift “towards decorative elements,” Weidinger said in the press release, which are the hallmarks of his later style. The Austrian painter is most recognized for the gilded couple he painted about 11 years later in “The Kiss,” which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. But his “last masterpiece” — a portrait of an unidentified woman with a fan — broke records in 2023 when it sold for £85.3 million ($108.4 million) in London from the collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. It not only surpassed the artist’s personal auction record, but became the most expensive artwork ever sold at a European auction.
Last year, another long-lost and recovered Klimt painting, “Portrait of Fräulein Lieser,” thought to be one of his final works, sold for €30 million ($32 million).
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