A painting by Gustav Klimt has become the third most expensive artwork ever sold in Europe, after fetching a record price of €55,929,919 at Sotheby's.

Bauerngarten (Flower Garden) became the Austrian symbolist's highest-priced landscape work when it was sold at the London auction house.

The oil-on-canvas depicting an "informal profusion of poppies, daisies and roses" follows Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man (€75,810,703 in 2010) and Peter Paul Rubens' The Massacre Of The Innocents (€57,742,492 in 2002) in the list of the three most expensive works sold in Europe.

Helena Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby's Europe, described the piece as "one of the artist's greatest masterpieces ever to come to auction".

It is the first time the piece has come to auction for more than 20 years.

Ms Newman said: "The star of this season's offering is undoubtedly Klimt's luminous Bauerngarten, dating from the artist's celebrated and much-loved golden period and from the same year as his famous golden Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I."

It is one of the artist's greatest masterpieces ever to come to auction

"Innovative in its composition and jewel-like in its exquisite blaze of colours, it is one of the artist's greatest masterpieces ever to come to auction."

"Most of the artist's oil paintings of this calibre are in major museums around the world with only a handful works of this importance having appeared at auction in the last decade."

The work was accompanied in the bidding by Pablo Picasso's Plant de tomates, which soared above the expected sale price of €12 million to €18 million, and became the Spaniard's record still-life sale after breaking the €20 million mark.

Amedeo Modigliani's Portrait of Baranowski sold for €18,693,155, whilst Paul Gauguin's Te Arii Vahine - La Femme aux mangos (The Woman With the Mangoes) sold within the expected estimate of €8 million to €12 million, at €9,765,839.

Klimt's Bauerngarten was exhibited at the Royal Academy's Painting the Modern Garden exhibition last year, and is the latest of the painter's Golden Years works to go to auction.