A Georgia O'Keeffe landscape that spent decades boxed away in a New York apartment closet will go under the hammer at Christie's 20th Century Evening sale on 17 November, carrying an estimate of up to $3 million. Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I was painted in 1930, a year after the artist's first visit to New Mexico, and depicts Lobo Peak in the high desert country that became central to her work.

The picture is thought to be one of three versions of the composition that O'Keeffe completed. A second painting in the series is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while the third is in a private collection after once belonging to David and Peggy Rockefeller. Its reappearance adds a little-known early canvas to the public record of an artist whose New Mexico landscapes are among the most recognisable images in American modernism.

The work is an important early record of O'Keeffe's growing attachment to the desert landscape. Its undulating contours and near-anatomical forms, rendered in saturated earth tones against a high-contrast palette, already carry the visual language that would define her later paintings of the region. Painted when she was still absorbing the terrain around Abiquiu, it captures the moment the landscape became her enduring subject.

How the canvas came to sit at the back of a closet in an East Village apartment for some forty years is part of its appeal: a major painting by one of America's best-known artists, hidden in plain sight in a domestic interior while its sister version hung in the Met. Its emergence now, just short of a century after it was painted, gives collectors a rare chance to acquire a rediscovered O'Keeffe at auction.