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Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) has sold for a record $236.4 million at auction - making it the second most valuable artwork ever sold at auction.

The sale, conducted by Sotheby’s in New York, doubled the previous record for a Klimt painting.

Charles F. Stewart, Sotheby’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “We witnessed art market history tonight at Sotheby’s. How fitting that we inaugurated our new building by offering Leonard A. Lauder's extraordinary collection, whose vision and generosity was so closely associated with the history of the Breuer.”

The six-foot-tall portrait, painted during Vienna’s early-20th-century Golden Age, depicts Elisabeth Lederer, the young heiress daughter of prominent Klimt patrons, wrapped in an ornate Chinese robe. Sotheby’s declined to identify the buyer.

The painting has a remarkable history. During the Nazi era, Elisabeth Lederer attempted to save herself by falsely claiming Klimt – who died in 1918 and was not Jewish – was her father. With help from her former brother-in-law, a senior Nazi official, she obtained documentation asserting she was descended from the artist. This allowed her to remain in Vienna, where she died in 1944.

The painting was looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during the Second World War, then returned in 1948 to Lederer’s brother, Erich, a close friend of Egon Schiele. He kept the work until selling it in 1983.

Estée Lauder heir Leonard A Lauder obtained the painting in 1985, who displayed it in his New York home and lent it to galleries. Lauder died in June, aged 92.

Two further Klimt works from Lauder’s collection also drew strong interest. Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow), expected to fetch more than $80 million, sold for $86 million, while Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee) (1916) sold for $68.3 million. Two pencil studies by Klimt exceeded estimates, bringing the artist’s total across the evening to more than $391.6m.

Sotheby’s sale of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of 20th-century masterpieces achieved $527.5 million in total.