A Gustav Klimt portrait of an African prince that was lost after World War II is on view at TEFAF Maastricht, bearing a €15 million ($16.4 million) price tag. When a collector presented the painting to W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Gallery of Vienna and New York in 2021, it was badly in need of cleaning and in an unattractive frame. But there was, peeking out, a stamp indicating that it came from the estate of the Austrian superstar.
The gallery called in Alfred Weidinger, who wrote the 2007 catalog raisonné on the artist. He had been on the lookout for the painting for some two decades, and identified it as a portrait of an Osu prince from the region now called Ghana.
Measuring just over two feet high, Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona (1897) came after Klimt and an artist friend, Franz Matsch, attended a popular event at the Tiergarten am Schüttel, a zoo that also held ethnographic exhibitions where people were put on display. That year, there was a display purported to present representatives of the Ashanti people, also known as the Asante, a part of the Akan ethnic group, from what is now Ghana and was then under colonial rule by the British. In fact, the show presented members of the Osu people.
About 120 members of the Osu tribe traveled on a mail steamer to Vienna and went on display for eager audiences numbering as many as 10,000 a day. The exhibition, wrote Weidinger in a text provided by the gallery, was actually incorrectly titled “The Gold Coast and its inhabitants: Ashanti.” The show was widely covered in the press, and locals invited the Osu people to events at Viennese theaters and coffee houses.
“The composition and painterly execution point to Klimt’s turn towards decorative elements, which were to characterize his later work, and are directly linked to his pioneering portraits of the following years,” said Weidinger in press materials. He links the work stylistically to Klimt’s 1897–98 portrait of Sonja Knips, which hangs at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum and also shows its subject against an abstract background with floral accents.
Both Klimt and Matsch painted the prince, Weidinger noted. He suggested that both were commissioned, but said that the fact that Klimt’s painting went unsigned and remained with the artist indicated to him that the client chose Matsch’s rendition.
The painting is believed to have stayed with Klimt until it was offered in an auction at Vienna’s Samuel Kende auction house in 1923 for a starting price of 15,000 crowns; it is not known whether it sold. Ernestine Klein was indicated as the owner when the work went on view in 1928 at a memorial exhibition for the artist at the Vienna Secession; the artist had died in 1918. Ernestine and her husband Felix, a wine wholesaler, had converted the artist’s former studio into a villa.
Owing to their Jewish origins, the couple fled Austria when the Nazis took control in 1938, eventually ending up living secretly in Monaco and spending the last year of the war living in a safe room. The painting was unaccounted for until it resurfaced in 2023 and is on view following a restitution settlement with Ernestine Klein’s heirs. The Belvedere, the Wien Museum, and the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf have all returned artworks to the heirs, noted Weidinger.
The portrait is the rare artwork that can boast a television documentary that explores its story, produced by InterSpot film and slated for broadcast during 2025.
The painting is the second long-lost portrait by the artist to come to auction in just the last year; another, missing for a century, fetched $32 million at Im Kinsky in Vienna. It was the highest price ever achieved by an Austrian auction house. Weidinger spoke out against that sale, saying there are gaps in the painting’s history that suggest it may have been expropriated by the Nazis.
Klimt’s current auction record stands at $108.8 million, fetched at Sotheby’s London in 2023 for the canvas Dame mit Fächer (ca. 1917–18); 17 of his works have exceeded the $10 million mark since 1994.
