A painting by Wassily Kandinsky that spent decades in a Dutch museum after its Jewish owner was murdered in the Holocaust has sold at auction for $44.9 million. “Murnau mit Kirche II” (Murnau with Church II) set a record price for the Russian artist in a sale at Sotheby’s in London. Completed in 1910, the brightly colored landscape of a Bavarian village foreshadows the bold abstract imagery of Kandinsky’s later work.

The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven returned the painting last year to the descendants of German-Jewish art collectors Johanna Margarete Stern and Siegbert Samuel Stern. Siegbert Stern died in 1935, and Johanna fled Nazi Germany for Amsterdam, where she was forced to sell much of her collection. She was arrested after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

Sotheby’s said proceeds from the sale will be shared among 13 surviving Stern heirs, and will also fund further research into the fate of the family’s collection.

In 2013, Dutch museums identified 139 artworks as Nazi loot, including paintings from masters such as Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee.