Cuno Amiet

This vibrant early watercolour by Cuno Amiet can likely be dated to the period when the artist was living and working in the small village of Hellsau, in the Swiss canton of Bern. Amiet had begun painting the landscape around Hellsau, a few miles southeast of his native Solothurn, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and chose to settle there soon after his return from France in 1893, establishing a studio on the upper floor of the Gasthof Freienhof inn. The artist lived in Hellsau until his move to nearby Oschwand in 1898.

Watercolour landscapes by Amiet are relatively rare, and are generally very freely drawn with saturated colours. Among stylistically comparable works are four watercolours - a view of the Bridge at Stampa dated 1891, a view of Maloja dated 1908, a Blue Landscape of c.1910 and a view of the Swiss mountain known as the Schynige Platte of c.1910-1915 – all formerly in the Loeb collection and sold at auction in Switzerland in 2019. Also similar is a view of L’Isle de St.-Pierre, dated 1906, and a Lake Landscape of 1930, both sold at auction in 2020.

The first owner of the present sheet was the German librarian, writer and collector Curt Blass (1881-1972), a close friend of the artist and a passive member of Die Brücke. As a young law student from Leipzig, Blass met Amiet and his wife in Oschwand in 1903 and often spent his holidays with them there in later years. Amiet designed a bookplate for Blass in 1903 and painted three small portraits of him in 1904 and another in 1909. He also produced a number of drawn portrait studies of Blass, together with three portraits in the form of colour woodcuts, executed in 1905, 1906 and 1908. In 1916 Blass married Hanni Miller, a former pupil of Amiet and the daughter of his friend, the Solothurn merchant and collector Oscar Miller.