Yellow Meadow with Tree

Yellow Meadow with Tree (Gelbe Wiese mit Baum) is an undated oil on canvas by Cuno Amiet of about 1898, 64 by 50 centimetres, monogrammed 'CA' in black at lower left; it is privately owned and was exhibited at Roggwil in 2018.

A slender little tree just coming into leaf stands at the centre of a high yellow-green meadow, the whole scene built from a narrow range of light colours. The catalogue raisonné remarks that the yellows, pinks and delicate turquoise tones are characteristic of Amiet and mark the picture off at a glance from the work of his artist friends; the pairing of this luminosity with graceful form lends it the ethereal note of his symbolist phase.

Stylistically — above all in its finely chiselled application of paint — the canvas stands close to what Amiet's friend Giovanni Giacometti was painting around 1898 and 1900. The two had met at the Munich academy in 1887 and remained lifelong friends; both admired Giovanni Segantini, whom they had got to know at Stampa in 1896 and whose handling of the brush influenced them, and Segantini had even asked them to collaborate on his large Bergell panorama planned for the Paris world's fair of 1900. In 1898 Amiet also showed work alongside Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler at the Zürcher Künstlerhaus.

The catalogue adds a small art-historical footnote of consequence: the early-spring sapling is Amiet's first painting built around the motif of a single tree, a subject that would occupy him again and again, in every season.