The Cellist

The Cellist (Der Cellospieler) is an oil on canvas by Cuno Amiet dated 1916, a bust-length portrait of 46 by 38 centimetres signed 'CA / 16' in red at lower left; it shows the Basel musician Hans Münch at the very start of his career and is privately owned.

Münch, born in Mulhouse in Alsace in 1893, had studied piano, organ, cello and composition at the Basel conservatory from 1912 and was soon teaching there himself; as a young man he still played cello in the orchestra that he would one day direct. Amiet painted him making music at Oschwand. Münch went on to conduct the Basel Bach Choir from 1922 to 1926, directed the conservatory and its music school from 1935 to 1947, took over the concert series of the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft from Felix Weingartner and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 1939; the conductor Charles Munch was his cousin.

The catalogue raisonné records three portraits of Münch with his cello from 1916 alone: two small busts — the present one en face, another in half profile — and a full-length canvas of 171 by 121 centimetres that the Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde gave to the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1917. This en face version was probably painted as a detail study toward the large portrait, to which the viewpoint is close. Amiet lets the rust-red ground take an active part in the design: it shows through beneath the blue and green strokes, for instance in the face.

Recorded in private collections, the small painting has never left private hands.