Auction introduction: Spanning six centuries of European art, the July Old Masters Part I auction will include one of the richest arrays of masterworks in over a decade. Leading the sale is one of the few remaining masterpieces by Titian in private hands: Rest on the flight into Egypt, from the collection at Longleat, painted in circa 1510 and with an astonishing ownership history across the centuries. We present the most spectacular of Georges Stubbs’s celebrated Mares and Foals paintings, one of the largest works ever painted by the artist and his crowning achievement, which cemented his reputation as the greatest animal painter in the history of European art. Quentin Metsys’s The Madonna of the Cherries marks a landmark rediscovery of one of his most celebrated late masterpieces, which helped cement his reputation as the founder of the Antwerp school of painting. A remarkably lively masterpiece by Frans Hals, which has remained in the same family for over a century, demonstrates why he was the most prized portraitist in Haarlem, whose feats in portraiture were rivalled only by Rembrandt in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic. The sale includes many other works of exceptional quality.