Art by Congo, the Famous Painting Ape, to Go on Sale at London's Mayor Gallery

Art by Congo, the Famous Painting Ape, to Go on Sale at London's Mayor Gallery

In December, a beloved 20th-century artist will finally get his due when a lot of 55 paintings by Congo the chimpanzee goes on exhibit at the Mayor Gallery in London.

The paintings are owned by Desmond Morris, who hosted “Zoo Time,” a U.K. show broadcast from the London Zoo in the 1950s.

Morris was no ordinary television host. He was a noted abstract painter, an ethologist (someone who studies animal behavior) and zoologist. He’s also the author of many popular science books, including 1967’s The Naked Ape, which examines humans through a zoologists lens.

As Nigel Reynolds at the Telegraph reports, one day Morris offered the young chimp Congo a pencil and the rest was history. “He took it [the pencil] and I placed a piece of card in front of him,” Morris recalls. “This is how I recorded it at the time, ‘Something strange was coming out of the end of the pencil. It was Congo’s first line. It wandered a short way and then stopped. Would it happen again? Yes, it did, and again and again.’”