For decades, no one knew where it was. In 1974, the Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu painted Tutu, a portrait of the Yoruba princess Adetutu Ademiluyi. Prints made it famous across Nigeria, where people called it the “African Mona Lisa”. The original vanished. In 2017, it was found in a north London flat. A few months later, it sold at auction for £1.2 million.
Ben Enwonwu and Anyanwu
Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu was born in 1917 in Onitsha. He studied art in Nigeria and Britain and became one of Africa’s most celebrated modern artists. In 1957, he became the first African artist commissioned to sculpt Queen Elizabeth II. His bronze sculpture Anyanwu, depicting a female figure representing the rising sun, stands at the National Museum in Lagos and a version at the United Nations in New York.
The princess and the lost painting
Adetutu Ademiluyi was a granddaughter of an Ooni of Ife. Enwonwu painted her in three portraits in the 1970s. Enwonwu, an Igbo artist, painting a Yoruba princess after the civil war, made Tutu a symbol of national reconciliation. The original painting disappeared and was believed lost. Posters and prints kept the image alive. In 2017, a family in London asked Bonhams to value a painting they owned. Experts identified it as the lost Tutu.
The auction and his career
In February 2018, it sold at Bonhams in London for £1.2 million, far above estimates and a record for a Nigerian modernist painting at the time. Other Tutu portraits later surfaced and were sold. The sale drew attention to the value of modern African art in the international market. Enwonwu taught art, worked as an art adviser to the Nigerian government and exhibited widely in Europe and America. He blended Igbo traditions with modern European techniques.
The art market and the princess remembered
Since the Tutu sale, works by Nigerian modernists such as Enwonwu, Uche Okeke and Yusuf Grillo have attracted growing attention at auctions in London and Lagos. Ben Enwonwu died in 1994. After the sale, members of Adetutu Ademiluyi’s family spoke about her life and the pride they felt that the portrait had been found. The story renewed interest in Ile-Ife’s royal history and in Enwonwu’s role in recording it.
Tutu spent years hanging unrecognised in a London home. Nigerians had kept her face on their walls all along, in prints that cost almost nothing.
