Almost 100 years after it was first exhibited at The Royal Academy in 1914, Trinity House Paintings brings John Singer Sargent’s (1856 - 1925) beautiful landscape ‘Cypresses and Pines’ back to London for Masterpiece London 2013 (27 June – 3July). This marks the first time this important signed painting (priced in excess of $10million) has come to the open market in over 70 years.

‘Cypresses and Pines’ was exhibited in 1914 to overwhelmingly positive reviews, lauded by the Evening News as ‘perhaps the best landscape’ in the Royal Academy Exhibition and by The Daily Telegraph, wonderfully, as: ‘a study of all penetrating Italian sunlight and luminous shadow, superbly composed, and painted with a certainty, an accomplishment that could hardly be surpassed’. The New York Times reported ‘…here we are carried away by the force of the illusion. We can almost smell and hear the crackling grass of the hot Southern hillside…’.

Steven Beale, Director of Trinity House Paintings, says “John Singer Sargent, an American born and raised in Italy, was one of the most celebrated portrait painters at the turn of the 20th Century. Tending to work in bursts of high production, his oeuvre includes around nine hundred oil paintings and more than two thousand watercolours, without counting his sketched and charcoal drawings.  Sargent travelled extensively, painted constantly and inspired countless people. He spent time in Broadway, where our main gallery is, making the exhibition of this painting particularly significant to us.”

In fact, Singer Sargent’s large piece, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887 and showed two young girls lighting lanterns in an English garden, was produced in the Cotswolds village of Broadway, on the same High Street as Trinity House Paintings. This painting was immediately purchased by the Tate Gallery, where it is still exhibited today.

‘Cypresses and Trees’ will appear in vol. 8 of the Sargent catalogue raisonne 'Figures and Landscapes, 1908-1913' to be published in 2014 by Yale University Press by renowned Sargent specialist, and the artist’s great nephew, Richard Ormond. “I think it is a magnificent work, with late afternoon sunlight streaming into the glade, and the trees standing round like silent sentinel.” says Ormond, who suggests that the painting was painted on the slopes of Mount Baldo, near Lake Garda.

‘Cypresses and Pines’ will be exhibited at Masterpiece London 2013 which runs from June 27th – July 3rd 2013. www.masterpiecefair.com