Simplon Pass, 1911 John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of John Singer Sargent also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Simplon Pass is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

White water frets over rocks at the lower left, painted so briskly you can almost hear it. A stony path then slips upward through the scree, as if the landscape has briefly allowed you a way in. But the mountain does not oblige. It sits back, broad-shouldered and cool, holding its shadow like a cloak.

This is Simplon Pass (1911), made when Sargent had largely had enough of grand portrait obligations and turned, with relief, to places like this Alpine crossing near the Italian border. You sense that relief in the paint. Nothing here is overly arranged. Instead, everything is attentively seen: the scatter of boulders, the thin green that survives between them, the quick, hard sunlight skimming the ground.

Look at the foreground stones. Some are laid in with long, slanted strokes of warm grey and ochre, then snapped into focus with a single flick of cool blue. That little colour quarrel - warm against cold - gives the rocks their weight. Across the middle distance the handling dries out; the marks become shorter, more abraded, as if the brush is scraping along the hillside. It is a canny shift, because it makes the air feel clearer, the distance firmer.

Light does the organising. The near slope is bleached and busy, while the great mass of Hübschhorn is sunk in deep tone, interrupted by mauve passages that describe its steep planes without prettifying them. High above, clouds gather and break in creamy lumps, and a few pockets of snow cling to the long incline, stitching mountain to sky. One might imagine the particular smell of sun-warmed stone and meltwater - clean, metallic, slightly sharp.

Sargent’s perspective is cheeky, too. The track promises a traditional recession, but the mountain’s silhouette presses forward, almost like a stage flat, recalling how Cézanne can make a hillside feel both solid and oddly near. Perhaps that is the quiet drama here: not heroics, not picturesque charm, but the sensation of weather and altitude meeting a painter who has stopped performing and started looking. In the National Gallery of Art Washington USA, it still feels like fresh air.