A long-lost portrait of an Ife princess described as the “African Mona Lisa” sold at a London auction on Wednesday February 28, 2018 for £1.2m. The selling price exceeded the estimate of £300,000 for the painting when it went under the hammer at Bonhams auction house.
It is a record for a painting by the late Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu.
The 1974 painting of the Ife princess had recently turned up in a London flat after not being seen in decades. The work was discovered after a family in north London contacted Giles Peppiatt, Bonham’s director of modern African art following recent lucrative sales of Nigerian artworks at auction.
The said painting by Ben Enwonwu is thought of as the African Mona Lisa.
Ben Enwonwu, who died in 1994, is considered the father of Nigerian modernism. He made three paintings of Tutu, the locations of all of which had been a mystery until the recent discovery.