The Art Insider reports that a Georgia O'Keeffe landscape sat for about 40 years in its original wooden box behind the coats in an East Village apartment closet, its owner rarely mentioning it.

Earlier this year, while her niece was helping sort through her things, the owner said almost in passing that there was an O'Keeffe in the closet — and there was.

The painting, *Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I* (1930), is now on view at Christie's at Rockefeller Center and will be offered in the house's 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, with an expected price of around $3 million.

IndulgExpress describes the work as a slim, wide canvas of just 10 by 24 inches that fits easily into a box, and a closet.

According to The Art Insider, the work had effectively vanished from scholarship: O'Keeffe's catalogue raisonné listed it as "unlocated," known only from a 1931 photograph taken when it hung in a New York gallery.

That is why, as IndulgExpress notes, collectors counted it as lost rather than undiscovered — the picture was known to exist, but no one knew where it had gone. Christie's confirmed the attribution through that photograph, the 1963 receipt and the painting itself.

The Art Insider reports Christie's specialist Tylee Abbott called the sale "a once-in-a-lifetime moment," and that the intensely private owner died not long after the painting was rediscovered, with the family asking not to be named.

The Art Insider traces the painting's paper trail to 1963, when the owner's mother bought it for $3,800 from the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan — the dealer that handled O'Keeffe's work at the time — and gave it to her daughter as a graduation gift; the original bill of sale survives.

The owner hung it for two decades before reportedly taking it down in the mid-1980s after a guest at one of her bridge games showed a little too much interest, then packing it away.

IndulgExpress adds that the niece who retrieved it lives in Rhode Island, and that the painting will go on public view for the first time since its rediscovery before the sale.

The Abiquiu subject ties the canvas to O'Keeffe's earliest northern New Mexico summers, which The Art Insider notes began in 1929 and became defining images of her career.

At around $3 million, the estimate sits well below O'Keeffe's ceiling.

The Art Insider notes her auction record remains *Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1* (1932), which sold at Sotheby's in 2014 for $44.4 million — a record IndulgExpress identifies as the mark for a female artist at auction — and that her New Mexico landscapes generally sell for far less than her large flower paintings.

Still, both outlets suggest early works that are fresh to the market, with a clean ownership story, tend to draw strong bidding.

The sale lands in the busiest week of the year for New York's auction houses, when Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips hold their marquee evening sales, and The Art Insider speculates that a modest landscape that spent four decades behind the coats may yet be the lot people remember.

It is on free public view at Christie's, 20 Rockefeller Center, until November 17.