Ben Enwonwu was born in 1917 in Onitsha, Nigeria, to a sculptor father and a successful merchant mother, Enwonwu had a gift for the arts from a young age.
At the age of 17, he enrolled at Government College, Ibadan, where he studied fine art under the supervision of art tutor Kenneth C Murray. Two years later, he received a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University of London, UK.
Enwonwu also studied at Goldsmiths and Oxford and later completed postgraduate work in social anthropology at the London School of Economics.
His encounters with racism in London partly fuelled his decision to study anthropology.
A painting by the late Nigerian master painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu this week sold for £1.1m ($1.4m) at an auction in the British capital, London.
The painting, titled “Christine”, is of Christine Davis, an American hairstylist who moved to Lagos with her British husband and struck up a friendship with the painter. “Christine” was completed in 1971.
Another work by Enwonwu, of an Ife princess Tutu, affectionately dubbed “Africa’s Mona Lisa”, was sold in 2018 for £1.2m. It is considered a national masterpiece. Celebrated Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told the BBC in 2013: “This particular painting “Tutu,” the print, hung on every wall, of every middle-class family in eastern Nigeria when I was growing up.”
