A painting by Adolf Hitler which may have hung in Sigmund Freud’s office is to be auctioned in Britain.

The starting price for the watercolour, signed “A.Hitler, 1910”, is £10,000.

Art experts believe the painting, of a church in the mountains, may have hung in psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s office in Vienna before he fled to London in 1938 to escape the Nazis. The painting has ‘Studio Medico Sigmund Freud Vienne’ written on the back.

Both Freud and Hitler lived in Vienna at the same time; the Austrian-born Hitler lived there while trying to make a living as a painter.

The future Nazi dictator was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, which cited “unfitness for painting” and suggested he try architecture.

Richard Westwood-Brookes from Mullock's Specialist Auctioneers, which is selling the painting, told the Daily Telegraph that the two may have known each other in Vienna, and that Freud may have bought the painting from Hitler.

He said: “We will never know for certain whether this was Freud's, but it raises the tantalising prospect that the two men might have met.”

The painting will be sold in Lulow, Shropshire on March 2.