The identity of this young, Muslim man reclining amid an abstracted landscape of browns and greens is unknown to viewers today. But to Ben Enwonwu, the Nigerian artist who captured his subject’s contemplative and relaxed appearance, his identity would have been known. In the 1930s and 1940s, Enwonwu traveled across Nigeria, then colonized by the British Empire, intimately capturing the people and places he encountered. The painting’s impressionistic brushwork reflects the artist’s training in modern European art styles and techniques at the Slade School of Fine Arts at the University of London. Enwonwu was the first African student in the history of the British institution, and subsequently became known for, according to art historian Sylvester Ogbechie (born 1965), his ability to channel both “indigenous Igbo-African and European aesthetic ideals.”