Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Pierre Soulages, Richard Serra—these illustrious names in the history of art draw visitors to Luxembourg's Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart. Yet, alongside these masters, the museum also showcases long-forgotten artists who are equally deserving of our attention.

Ruud Priem, the museum's Head of Department and Curator of Fine Arts, recently oversaw the acquisition of a striking portrait. With a decade at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and collaborations worldwide, Priem has engaged deeply with celebrated masterpieces while demonstrating a discerning eye for overlooked treasures.

In the 1870s, Franz von Matsch trained alongside Gustav Klimt and his brother Ernst at Vienna's School of Applied Arts, all steeped in conservative academic traditions. After their studies, in 1883, the trio collaborated on public commissions until Gustav Klimt distanced himself from the traditional painting style. Favouring artistic innovation, Klimt's art underwent a major shift in 1895, and two years later, he co-founded the Vienna Secession, one of the most avant-garde movements of the time.

Despite their diverging paths, Klimt and Matsch appear to have maintained a close relationship, as evidenced by their joint portrayal of the man in a toga. This enigmatic sitter is also the subject of one of Klimt's paintings, which depicts him in three-quarter view. The portrait itself is shrouded in mystery, having last been seen in public at a 1928 retrospective marking the 10th anniversary of Klimt's death. A black-and-white photograph from a 1923 auction catalogue is the only visual trace of the painting that exists today.

In a 2012 publication, art historian Tobias Natter questioned the dating and subject of Klimt’s portrait. Natter speculated that it might depict an African sculpture Klimt admired at Brussels’ Musée du Congo in 1914. Enter Alfred Weidinger, Vienna’s Belvedere Museum’s former vice-president, who established the link between Klimt’s and Matsch’s portraits to around 1897. This was not only the year when Klimt began incorporating flowers into the backgrounds of his works, but also the year a group of Ga people from Ghana were “hired” to “perform” in Vienna’s “Tiergarten” (German for “zoo”).

Returning to Weidinger, he, along with one of the Belvedere’s Curators Markus Fellinger, identified the figure in both portraits as William Nii Nortey Dowuona, the leader of the Ga people from Osu in Ghana. Dowuona came to Vienna’s “Tiergarten” to perform with a group of 70 warriors and about 50 women and children, all for a modest fee. At the time, the world of show business provided a fertile ground for artists seeking life models that were both affordable and challenged academic conventions. In the catalogue accompanying the 2019 exhibition “Le modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse” at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Estelle Béhué and Isolde Pludermacher note that for 19th-century artists, depicting a Black model marked a significant departure from the beauty standards of the time, which were anchored in the facial features and whiteness of Greek statues.

Matsch’s portrayal sharply contrasts with long-prevailing depictions of young African men and women in orientalist attire or as domestic pages, emphasising the absolute domination and prosperity of their masters. Instead, the man here is neither a mere decorative motif nor a stereotype; he is presented in a dignified and attentive portrait. As the Orsay exhibition catalogue highlights, artists of this era played a key role in challenging racist and colonial ideologies.

While most black models from this period remain nameless, William Nii Nortey Dowuona’s identity is now memorialised at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart. He was Prince of the Ga people from Osu in the Grand Accra region of Ghana, West Africa. Priem hopes to one day reunite this portrait with Klimt’s missing piece, should it still exist and resurface. The twin portraits not only share the same subject but also the same palette, with “the two painters having used the exact same colours”, Priem further explains. Their reunion, if it ever happens, would certainly add an exciting chapter to this story and perhaps unveil further details.