Under the Cypress Trees at Corfu

John Singer Sargent · 1909

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

74.9 × 94 cm (29 1/2 × 37 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

American Realism

Under the Cypress Trees at Corfu captures the particular stillness of a Mediterranean afternoon, where dark columnar trees press upward against a luminous sky with an almost architectural authority. Sargent painted this during his extended travels through Greece and the Adriatic in the summer of 1909, a period when he had largely stepped back from society portraiture to pursue landscape work on his own terms. The result is painting at its most liberated — broad, assured strokes that suggest flickering light and dry heat without ever labouring the point. Where his portraits demanded precision and diplomacy, these travel works show Sargent thinking purely as a painter. Corfu drew several significant British and American artists during this era, and Sargent returned to its landscape repeatedly, producing a body of work now considered among his finest plein air output. Now held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the original rewards close attention: the confidence of each mark is inseparable from the painting's atmosphere. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made by skilled artists working from high-resolution reference, matching the scale, palette, and brushwork of the original so that what you receive is a genuine painted object — not a print — with the texture and presence the image was always meant to have.