Lyon & Turnbull will offer what it describes as the most significant painting by Joan Eardley ever to come to auction, when Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing goes under the hammer in Edinburgh on 3 December. Painted in 1960, the canvas carries an estimate of £100,000 to £150,000, plus fees.

The painting has spent most of its life out of sight. It was acquired by the present owner's mother in 1964 and has been shown in public only once in the six decades since — a scarcity that has only sharpened its reputation among collectors of Scottish art.

Eardley, who died in 1963 aged 42, made the children of Glasgow's Townhead district her defining subject. From 1953 she kept a studio above a scrap-metal merchant's premises in the district, sketching and photographing the games and arguments of the neighbourhood's children among its decaying tenements. Her Townhead paintings are now regarded as the defining images of a district that was largely demolished in the decades after her death, and the children she painted there remain her most recognisable subjects. The back streets, with their playing children, became the core of her work, and this canvas, painted three years before her death, is among the most ambitious of them.

The painting was shown at the Mall Galleries in London from 27 to 29 October as part of a preview of the December sale, alongside works including Stanley Cursiter's Girls at a Window. The Scottish Paintings & Sculpture auction takes place live in Edinburgh and online on 3 December, with the catalogue going live in early November.