In addition to his strong personal qualities as a painter, the importance of Cuno Amiet (1868-1961) rests upon his having introduced French Postimpressionism into Switzerland. With Ferdinand Hodler he ranks as the first and most influential modernist Swiss artist.

Cuno Amiet was born in Solothurn, Switzerland, the son of the historian and local archivist J. J. Amiet in 1868. At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to the Swiss realist painter Frank Buchser, a powerful personality whose interest during the 1860s in the transcription of the effects of light prefigured that of the Impressionists. In 1887 and 1888 Amiet was enrolled at the Munich Academy, where he met his life-long friend Giovanni Giacometti (the father of the sculptor, Alberto), and in 1889 he and Giacometti transferred to the Académie Julian in Paris. During the summers he continued to work with Buchser until the latter's death in 1890.

Amiet found his academic...