Garden and House at Oschwand

Garden and House at Oschwand (Garten und Haus auf der Oschwand) is an oil on canvas by Cuno Amiet dated 1909, a small upright canvas of 40.3 by 32.1 centimetres signed 'CA 09' at lower right; the Swiss Institute for Art Research lists it under no. 220922 0004 as an autograph work.

Dense green foliage fills most of the picture; through it emerge the pale walls and orange-red roofs of two buildings, a low house in the middle distance and at upper right a taller gable glowing against deep-blue sky. The grandfather of the last owner had acquired the painting directly from Amiet, and it was sold at Koller in Zurich on 2 December 2022 (lot 3064) for 30,800 Swiss francs.

Oschwand, a hamlet above Herzogenbuchsee in the canton of Bern, had been Amiet's home since his marriage to Anna Luder in 1898. In 1908 and 1909 the young architect Otto Ingold built him a house there with studio and garden, into which the family moved around the summer of 1909; the garden, the fruit trees and the houses around it then became a recurring subject in all seasons. Other views of the new property painted the same year are recorded, among them a larger near-square canvas described in a 1930 Lucerne sale catalogue as showing a gardener's house and a sunlit gable in a broad, pastose manner.

The present small picture belongs to that moment of arrival: Amiet's home, garden and orchard had just become the centre of his work and would remain so for the rest of his life.