This Painting of Lounging Lions Was Hanging In A Family’s Living Room. It Turned Out To Be An Original Delacroix
— By Andy Corbley | Mar 28, 2025
Up for auction today at a swanky Parisian auction house will be a slightly lazy paint sketch of some lions.
But these relaxed beasts are more than they appear. As it turns out, the work entitled Study of Reclining Lions was a lost creation from one of Paris’ greatest ever modern painters: Eugène Delacroix.
The man whose hand wielded the brush that gave the world Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix also painted these 7 lions in a swirl of brown and ochre savannah, but after a 1830 sale following his death, the work disappears from records.
It turned up during an appraisal at a home in France’s central region of Touraine conducted by Malo de Lussac.
“The owners were not sure that it was a Delacroix,” de Lussac tells Agence France-Presse. “When I arrived in the living room, my gaze was attracted by his magnetism. It was very moving. Delacroix’s works are seen very regularly in museums but very little in private hands.”
Sophia Anderson at the Smithsonian Magazine reports that Delacroix loved very much to observe the tigers and lions kept in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
“How necessary it is to … stick one’s head out of doors and try to read from creation, which has nothing in common with cities and the works of man,” Delacroix once wrote, and Anderson shared.
Up for auction at Hôtel Drouot auctioneers, the estimate is between €200,000 and €300,000.
“Over the course of his career, Eugène Delacroix produced numerous studies of fauves [wild animals] either for their own sake or for inclusion in a scene with figures,” writes Lee Johnson in The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816-1831. “In 1829, he considered a composition on this theme for the Salon, hesitating whether to paint lions or tigers at rest, in contrast to the academic subjects of fighting and hunting. He finally opted for the latter, and exhibited a Young Tiger Playing with its Mother.“
Klimt Painting of An African Prince Lost For Nearly 100 Years Goes On Show In Austria
— By Andy Corbley | Mar 25, 2025
Prince William NII Nortey Dowuona, 1897 – Credit Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Galleries.
A portrait of a stately West African leader painted by famed Austrian artist Gustav Klimt has reappeared in public after being lost before World War II.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since it was last seen, and is now exhibited at Wienerroither & Kohlbacher Gallery in Vienna, with a price tag of €15 million.
The portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona—a representative of the Ga people in West Africa, comprising parts of modern-day Ghana, was painted by Klimt in 1897, sold by the artist’s estate in 1923, and lost by 1938.
An art historian who had been searching for the work for 2 decades verified its authenticity for W&K Galleries with the help of a well-faded stamp on the back of the canvas. A wealthy Austrian Jewish family who had converted Klimt’s studio into a villa acquired the painting in 1928 for an exhibition.
That was the last time and place it was seen, for by 1938, the Klein family had abandoned their property and fled the growing anti-semitism in their homeland to Monaco.
“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 Alfred Weidinger, who authenticated the work, in press materials.
Prince Dowuona traveled to Vienna for a late-colonial sing-and-dance called the Völkerschau which exhibited ethnographic displays from colonized people around the world at an urban zoo. This is where a friend of Klimt’s first found the stately African leader, who was one of 120 Ga people who traveled via steamship to Austria for the Völkerschau, according to Art Net.
It’s believed that both Klimt and his friend Matsch painted Dowuona, but being that this work remained unsigned and in Europe, the client, whoever it was, probably selected the one painted by Matsch.
Klimt’s corpus includes many that have fetched 8-figure sums at auction houses, and one that sold for $108 million of an unknown woman holding a fan. There is currently no plan to auction this work.
Lost Rembrandt Found Tucked Away In Attic In Maine Sells For $1.4 Million During Bidding War
— By Andy Corbley | September 11, 2024
Kaja Veilleux auctioning the Rembrandt painting Portrait of a Girl – Credit Thomaston Auction Galleries
“Tucked away” in a home attic in Maine alongside a “collection of heirlooms and antiques” art appraisers found a lost Rembrandt portrait.
Depicting a teenage woman in 17th-century Dutch attire, it recently sold at auction for $1.4 million, delighting the handlers who know it will be preserved and shared with the art world in a manner befitting the Dutch master.
The sale was handled by New England’s Thomaston Place Auction Galleries and Appraisers, who were on a routine house call to Camden, Maine. Kaja Veilleux, the gallery’s founder and a seasoned appraiser, was the one who eventually pinned the portrait as something special.
“We often go in blind on house calls, not knowing what we’ll find,” Veilleux said.
Painted on an oak board, and set in a gold Dutch frame, Veilleux turned the work over and found a neat little tag from the Philidelphia Museum of Art with the word ‘Rembrandt’ on it. It also bore the name of the work, Portrait of a Girl.
Not something you see every day to be sure. While finding masterworks of all sorts hidden in attics and cellars is no strange phenomenon, they’re typically rediscovered in Europe. To find one in Maine was a real shock.
A bit of research uncovered that the work was loaned by a Mr. Cary W. Bok to the museum for an exhibition in 1970. How it ended up in Maine is a mystery.
“Not many painters paint like Rembrandt, for one thing, and one of the trademarks of the Rembrandt paintings and the Dutch masters is what I call a ‘ribbon candy collar,'” Mr. Veilleux, wearing a soft gold waistcoat as part of his auctioneer attire, told local news channel WMTW in a Nick Nolte-like gravelly voice as he gestured to the girl’s lace collar.
It’s the first time he’s auctioned a piece for more than $1 million. He said that most things sell in about 30 seconds, but the Rembrandt sale went on for 10 minutes, with 9 buyers engaging in a telephone bidding war that “could have brought anything.”
But it’s not about the money for Veilleux.
“To me, it’s about bringing this art to light so it’s protected, cared for, and preserved.”
While it hasn’t been authenticated, Veilleux seems convinced, and suggested that $1.4 million is, in fact, a bargain.
Painting Found In Italian Villa Basement Turns Out To Be Original Picasso
— By Andy Corbley | October 9, 2024
Credit, Andrea Lo Rosso, Provided to the Media
A painting that was found in a basement signed with the name “Picasso,” but that was dismissed, thrust into a cheap frame, hung in the family house, and then in a restaurant, has finally been recognized as an authentic piece by the Spanish artist.
The value is already estimated to be $6 million, but if recognized by the Pablo Picasso Foundation in Paris, it could be worth twice or thrice that much.
The painting is believed to be an asymmetrical image of Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s lover at a time when he spent a period on the Italian island of Capri, where in the 1950s, Luigi Lo Rosso, a local pawnbroker who used to comb dumps and abandoned houses for treasure, found it in the basement of an empty villa.
According to the story, reported stateside by CNN, Lo Rosso believed it to be authentic, but his wife was less impressed, and so Luigi stuck it in a frame and gave it to her as a present to her great chagrin.
Luigi’s son, Andrea, wasn’t even born at the time. He told CNN that his mother took the Picasso and another canvas covered in dust and lime her husband had found and washed them with detergent as if they were carpets.
In college, the younger Lo Rosso came upon another piece of Picasso’s depicting Dora Maar in an art history textbook, and learned he was in Capri at the time when it was made. Coming home, he told his mom they may have something special on their hands.
It took decades, but because Andrea went through the proper channels—namely treating it as if it were stolen and registering it with the patrimony police, more attention was given to it than the experts Andrea had first contracted were willing to offer.
Locked in a police vault in Milan until 2019, the quest for authentication of the work was concluded when Cinzia Altieri, a graphologist for a patrimony court in Milan, worked for several months to authenticate the Picasso signature in the corner—it was 100% real.
Andrea hasn’t stopped at Altieri’s examination, nor on the word of Luca Gentile Canal Marcante, an art expert and honorary president of the Swiss-based art restoration non-profit Arcadia Foundation, who also says it is doubtlessly authentic.
Andrea is seeking the approval of the Picasso Foundation in Paris—something his father always hoped might come to pass.
“I’m happy but let’s wait to toast, there is still one step to take before we consider this incredible story over,” Andrea Lo Rosso said.
“I continue to work as I do every day in the hope that even in Paris they will be convinced of the authenticity of the painting.”
Artwork Painted By Picasso Discovered In A Closet in Maine After A Half Century
— By Andy Corbley | Jul 12, 2021
John McInnis Auctioneers
While it sounds like the height of absurdity to say, one could never imagine how often it happens that paintings by art’s great masters are found in people’s attics.
In recent years, GNN has reported on a possible Da Vinci being found tucked away in a Scottish farmhouse. Then there was the case of a Fra Angelico Renaissance masterpiece being discovered in a modest house in the middle of England.
Now, a recent auction in Massachusetts featuring rare pieces of art collected from estates around the north-east has seen a previously unknown painting by Pablo Picasso being sold for $150,000.
Depicting Spanish well-to-dos attending the bull fighting arena, it is thought to be a preparatory sketch for a stage curtain as part of a 1919 Ballets Russes production (it’s still to be officially authenticated by the Picasso estate).
It was found tucked away with other paintings in the closet of a house belonging to a New England man’s recently deceased relative.
It would not be the first time a Picasso has turned up where one wouldn’t expect: A decade ago, GNN reported that hundreds of Picasso’s works, collected by a French electrician, had been received by a museum as a gift.
According to a statement by the anonymous seller on the auction house website, the Maine home in which the sketch work was found belonged to the man’s great aunt—she had studied in Europe, enjoyed bringing things back to the States, and generally lived an exciting life.
Then man came to own the house when his father inherited it after the great aunt passed away.
The 16×16 image on paper is believed to be a preliminary mock-up for the curtain that would act as the backdrop to Le Tricorne, which debuted at the Alhambra Theater in London after World War I.
The actual curtain which Picasso would later make is 20 feet by 19 feet, and is currently located in the New York Historical Society after spending 55 years on the wall in the Four Seasons restaurant. Picasso also designed the sets and the costumes for the play.
