A painting that spent three-quarters of a century out of public sight will return to view in Japan this month. Fujita Tsuguharu's Dream (La Fontaine), painted in 1949 during the artist's stay in New York, goes on display at the Karuizawa Ando Museum in Nagano prefecture from 10 November, the museum has announced. The work has not been shown publicly since the early 1950s.

Fujita painted the canvas in the year he moved to New York after the war, and it was first exhibited at the Mathias Komor Gallery in the city in 1949. It travelled to an exhibition in Madrid in 1951 and then disappeared into a private collection, where it remained for decades. In September this year it reappeared at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, where it fetched the highest price of the sale, and it has now entered the Ando Museum's holdings.

The painting belongs to a group of works from Fujita's New York period in which animals take on human characteristics, a series the artist pursued while living in the city. Its return to view is timed to the museum's exhibition marking the 140th anniversary of Fujita's birth, which surveys his New York years.

Visitors will be able to see Dream (La Fontaine) alongside two companion pictures from the same year. La Fontaine, on loan from the Pola Museum of Art, will hang beside it for the first time in 76 years, while Cat Classroom, already in the Ando Museum's collection, completes the group. Together, the three canvases offer a rare chance to compare Fujita's playful animal pictures side by side, in the town where one of Japan's leading collections of his work is held.