The Forest of Love (Breton Landscape)

Le Bois d'amour, an oil on canvas painted by Cuno Amiet in 1892, shows a little wood just north of Pont-Aven in Brittany; signed and dated 'CA / 92' at lower right, the 72.5-by-59.5-centimetre picture belongs to The Barrett Collection in Dallas.

Amiet painted it during his stay in Pont-Aven between May 1892 and June 1893. The fishing village had become a magnet for young artists through Paul Gauguin's sojourns; Gauguin himself had already left on his first voyage to Tahiti, but Amiet came into contact with his works and counted Paul Sérusier and the Irishman Roderic O'Conor among his friends, the latter introducing him to Van Gogh's art, to Seurat's divisionism and to the use of pure colour.

The wood had drawn painters before. Gauguin painted bathers at a mill there in 1886, and Émile Bernard depicted the spot in 1887 and 1888, both times building the composition on towering trunks much as Amiet does here. The catalogue raisonné finds Amiet's canvas — the front of a painting whose reverse carries a second work — closer in its colour range to Gauguin's Arbres bleus of 1888, which Amiet is unlikely to have known, so the orange floor and blue-grey trunks are better explained by the then-fashionable complementary contrast than by direct borrowing. What distinguishes it is a broad scale of finely nuanced grey tones laid out in clearly organised zones.

The picture later passed through Swiss private hands, was offered at Sotheby's in Zurich on 29 May 2000 (lot 116) and entered The Barrett Collection that same year. It was shown in the Geneva exhibition of 2000 and 2001 devoted to Amiet's path from Pont-Aven to the Brücke group (no. 8) and reproduced in colour in a 2004 collection publication.