Sunflowers

Sunflowers (Sonnenblumen) is an oil on canvas by Cuno Amiet dated 1941, 81 by 55 centimetres, signed and dated 'CA / 41' at lower right; it is recorded in the artist's online catalogue raisonné under no. 1941.18 and was last offered at Sotheby's in Zurich in 2018.

A single tall sunflower rises through the middle of the upright canvas, its heavy head and curling leaves drawn in saturated yellows and oranges against a deep blue-green ground; smaller plants and pale strokes at the foot of the picture suggest the edge of a garden. Amiet, seventy-three years old when he painted it, had lived at Oschwand in the canton of Bern since 1898, and the garden there supplied him with subjects in every season.

The painting's history is unusually well documented. It belonged to a Mrs Van Crefeld in Rotterdam, then passed to the Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and into an international private collection before appearing at Sotheby's in Zurich in late 1995 (lot 87), where it went to a Swiss private collection; offered again in the Swiss Art / Swiss Made sale of 2018 (lot 40), it carried an estimate of 60,000 to 80,000 Swiss francs.

The work numbers among the many flower subjects of Amiet's later years; its motif is a plant still growing outdoors rather than a cut bouquet.