LONDON: “I think of it as the African Mona Lisa,” said award-winning novelist Ben Okri, gazing at the long-lost portrait of a Nigerian princess which recently turned up in a London flat.
Ben Enwonwu’s 1974 painting of Adetutu “Tutu” Ademiluyi, daughter of a Yoruba king, has taken on almost mythical status in the painter’s native Nigeria.
It was last seen in 1975 but is now up for sale after its surprise rediscovery.
“It has been a legendary painting for 40 years, everybody keeps talking about Tutu, saying ‘where is Tutu?’,” the Booker Prize-winning writer Okri told AFP.
As a prominent Nigerian cultural figure on the world stage, Okri viewed the painting at prestigious London auction house Bonhams, where the work will be sold on February 28.
“He wasn’t just painting the girl, he was painting the whole tradition. It’s a symbol of hope and regeneration to Nigeria, it’s a symbol of the phoenix rising,” he said.
“I spent hours looking at it, making up for the time that we hadn’t seen it. It’s been a work of rumor, but here it is, crystallized.”
The work was uncovered by Giles Peppiatt, director of Modern African Art at Bonhams, after a north London family contacted him following lucrative recent sales of Nigerian artworks.
“It was quite remarkable when I walked into this flat in north London and saw it hanging on the wall, it was about the last thing I expected to see,” he explained.
“As soon as I saw it I knew it was authentic, but I couldn’t say that at the time to the owners because you can’t just blurt that out.”
After confirming the search for “Tutu” was over, the family “were, not surprisingly, pretty astounded,” he revealed. “It’s a missing masterpiece.”
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.
The works became symbols of peace following the clash of ethnic groups in the Nigerian-Biafran conflict of the late 1960s.
“The sitter is Yoruba and Ben Enwonwu was Ibo, so they were of different ethnic tribes,” said Eliza Sawyer, specialist in Bonhams’ African Art department.
“It was an important symbol of reconciliation.”
Enwonwu was from a politically-connected Ibo family and his father was a traditional sculptor. The painter stumbled upon his most famous muse by accident.
“He would go around local villages and sketch local scenes and figures, and he encountered this young woman whom he thought was just entrancing and requested to paint her, not knowing her stature,” explained Sawyer.
“She was a little taken back by the request,” she added.
“It is the peak of the artist’s career, there’s also the sitter’s status as a princess and thirdly the painting had been lost. That all creates an awful lot of mystery.”
The rediscovered painting was last displayed at the Italian embassy in Lagos in 1975, and was bought by the father of the north London family during a business trip.
“It was pretty much regarded as his prize work,” explained Peppiatt.
“I think he was secretly in love with the sitter. She is a very pretty lady.
“It’s pretty audacious, with the light under the chin, which focuses you on the head. As a bit of painting it stands on its own anyway, without any of the other stories,” he added.
The painting is expected to sell for around £250,000 ($347,000) when it goes on sale jointly in London and Lagos on February 28, but Okri argued that its worth was more than financial.
“It gives us a glimpse of an important African reconfiguration of the art of portraiture,” he said.
“It’s going to start a fire, start a debate. Never have they given proper due to African painters. This is the perfect work to start” to ask why, he added.
‘African Mona Lisa’ mesmerises after surprise rediscovery
‘African Mona Lisa’ mesmerises after surprise rediscovery
Kawthar Al-Atiyah: ‘My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind’
- The Saudi artist discusses her creative process and her responsibility to ‘represent Saudi culture’
RIYADH: Contemporary Saudi artist Kawthar Al-Atiyah uses painting, sculpture and immersive material experimentation to create her deeply personal works. And those works focus on one recurring question: What does emotion look like when it becomes physical?
“My practice begins with the body as a site of memory — its weight, its tension, its quiet shifts,” Al-Atiyah tells Arab News. “Emotion is never abstract to me. It lives in texture, in light, in the way material breathes.”
This philosophy shapes the immersive surfaces she creates, which often seem suspended between presence and absence. “There is a moment when the body stops being flesh and becomes presence, something felt rather than seen,” she says. “I try to capture that threshold.”
Al-Atiyah, a graduate of Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, has steadily built an international profile for herself. Her participation in VOLTA Art Fair at Art Basel in Switzerland, MENART Fair in Paris, and exhibitions in the Gulf and Europe have positioned her as a leading Saudi voice in contemporary art.
Showing abroad has shaped her understanding of how audiences engage with vulnerability. “Across countries and cultures, viewers reacted to my work in ways that revealed their own memories,” she says. “It affirmed my belief that the primary language of human beings is emotion. My paintings speak first to the body, then to the mind.”
Al-Atiyah says her creative process begins long before paint touches canvas. Instead of sketching, she constructs physical environments made of materials including camel bone, raw cotton, transparent fabrics, and fragments of carpet.
“When a concept arrives, I build it in real space,” she says. “I sculpt atmosphere, objects, light and emotion before I sculpt paint.
“I layer color the way the body stores experience,” she continues. “Some layers stay buried, others resurface unexpectedly. I stop only when the internal rhythm feels resolved.”
This sensitivity to the unseen has drawn attention from international institutions. Forbes Middle East included her among the 100 Most Influential Women in the Arab World in 2024 and selected several of her pieces for exhibition.
“One of the works was privately owned, yet they insisted on showing it,” she says. “For me, that was a strong sign of trust and recognition. It affirmed my responsibility to represent Saudi culture with honesty and depth.”
Her recent year-long exhibition at Ithra deepened her understanding of how regional audiences interpret her work.
“In the Gulf, people respond strongly to embodied memory,” she says. “They see themselves in the quiet tensions of the piece, perhaps because we share similar cultural rhythms.”
A documentary is now in production exploring her process, offering viewers a rare look into the preparatory world that precedes each canvas.
“People usually see the final work. But the emotional architecture built before the painting is where the story truly begins,” she explains.
Beyond her own practice, Al-Atiyah is committed to art education through her work with Misk Art Institute. “Teaching is a dialogue,” she says. “I do not focus on technique alone. I teach students to develop intuition, to trust their senses, to translate internal experiences into honest visual language.”
She believes that artists should be emotionally aware as well as technically skilled. “I want them to connect deeply with themselves so that what they create resonates beyond personal expression and becomes part of a cultural conversation,” she explains.
In Saudi Arabia’s rapidly growing art scene, Al-Atiyah sees her role as both storyteller and facilitator.
“Art is not decoration, it is a language,” she says. “If my work helps someone remember something they have forgotten or feel something they have buried, then I have done what I set out to do.”
