A painting by Georgia O'Keeffe that had not been seen in public for decades has turned up in a Manhattan closet, tucked behind coats in a wooden box, and will go on sale at Christie's in New York on 17 November 2026 with an estimate of about $3 million. The work, Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, was painted in 1930 and is the first of three views the artist made of Lobo Peak, a mountain near her home in New Mexico. The second version belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while the third once belonged to the Rockefeller family.

The picture measures just 10 by 24 inches and carries the artist's initials, OK, on its backboard. It was bought for $3,800 on 15 April 1963 at The Downtown Gallery in New York as a graduation present, and it hung in the family's home until the mid-1980s, when it was packed away and forgotten. For years its existence was known only from a single photograph reproduced in an appendix to the artist's catalogue raisonné, published in 1931.

Its reappearance has surprised specialists because O'Keeffe's early New Mexico landscapes rarely come to market, and the painting's long absence meant it had never been studied in person by scholars. The discovery adds a missing piece to the record of the artist's first years in the Southwest, when she was shifting from the flower paintings that made her famous toward the desert subjects that defined the rest of her career.

Christie's will offer the work in its 20th Century Evening Sale, where it is expected to draw strong interest from American art collectors. The sale takes place at a moment of renewed attention to O'Keeffe, whose market has remained steady even as tastes in modern American painting have shifted.