Lake Thun with the Stockhorn Range

Thunersee mit Stockhornkette — Lake Thun with the Stockhorn range — is an oil on canvas by Cuno Amiet dated 1924, 86 by 66 centimetres, monogrammed and dated at lower right; the work is registered at the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) under inventory number 80313.

A sailing boat with a broad white sail crosses the calm water of Lake Thun; a small rowboat lies farther off to the right, and behind the shore the jagged crest of the Stockhorn chain rises into a pale sky. Amiet lays lake and mountains in bands of light blue, lilac and white, and breaks the sail's reflection on the water into loose dappled strokes. Sotheby's catalogue note for the picture's 2016 appearance stresses these bands of bold colour and reads them as the trace of Amiet's years-long engagement with the painting of the French Impressionists.

Yet the boldest of his avant-garde ties had been German, not French. After a little-noticed exhibition at Galerie Richter in Dresden in 1905 had brought him to the attention of the young Dresden painters, Erich Heckel wrote inviting him to join the group they had just founded — Die Brücke — and Amiet accepted, holding the unusual distinction of having belonged both to Gauguin's circle at Pont-Aven and to the first group formation of German Expressionism.

The painting came from the Beurret & Bailly auction house in Basel, where it appeared on 23 June 2012 (no. 363), then passed to a Swiss private collection before being offered at Sotheby's in Zurich in 2016 (lot 52) with an estimate of 200,000 to 300,000 Swiss francs.