A Georgia O’Keeffe painting was buried in a New York apartment closet. It is going up for auction.

Detailed summary

Few if anyone knew about the hidden treasure until the woman in her 90s who lived there nonchalantly told her niece one day, “oh by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the closet.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The painting was buried behind coats and boxes in the closet of a Manhattan apartment for decades.

Few if anyone knew about the hidden treasure until the woman in her 90s who lived there nonchalantly told her niece one day, “oh by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the closet.”

The painting — an early example from a time when O’Keeffe became enamored with the American Southwest — depicts a classic New Mexico landscape with rolling hills in earth tones.

Christie’s estimates its value at $3 to $5 million. It is set to go up for auction on Tuesday.

The auction house says the painting from 1930 was likely the first in a series of three. The second is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The other, for many years, was in the collection of the Rockefeller family.

Up until now, the whereabouts of the first one had largely been a mystery.

The painting of Lobo Peak near Taos, New Mexico, is “particularly important because of its early date and its representation of the inception point of O’Keeffe’s time in the American Southwest,” said Tylee Abbott, director of American Art at Christie’s.

In 1963, a New York art gallery sold the painting for $3,800 to a woman who gave it to her daughter.

“Before that it was only known through photography that had been taken in 1931,” Abbott said.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.