Modern masterpieces set to make £69 million at Sotheby's

A landscape by Gustav Klimt seized by the Nazis and lost for decades is to be one of three works expected to make more than £10 million at auction next month.

The others are a still life, Pichet et fruits sur une table by Paul Cézanne, which has an upper estimate of £15 million. There is also a rare life-size sculpture, L'Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti which could fetch as much as £18 million.

A contemporary sale in London two years ago pulled off a similar feat with £10 million-plus works, but this auction at Sotheby's will be the first of Impressionist and modern art to feature a trio of different works with such high estimates.

The total estimate for the sale, on 3 February, is more than £69 million. Klimt's Kirche in Cassone (Church in Cassone — Landscape with Cypresses) painted in 1913, is the only surviving example of the artist's celebrated series of paintings of Lake Garda, Italy.

It was bought by Viktor Zuckerkandl and his wife, Paula, who were among the greatest patrons of the arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna. When the couple died childless in 1927, the painting went to Viktor's sister, Amalie Redlich, who in 1941 was deported to a Jewish ghetto. Her paintings were seized by the Gestapo and only much later did this work surface in a private collection.