Artist:  ARNOLD FIECHTER (Swiss, 1879 - 1943)

Title:   Untitled Landscape

Medium:   Original Oil on Canvas-Stretched board

Signature:  Hand Signed by the Artist in Oil, LR, as shown; also with notation by the Artist's family in ink and dated 1965 regarding its exhibition and sale, verso

Provenance:  Hatay Stratton Fine Art, Northampton,  Massachusettes

About the Artist:   Arnold Fiechter (1879 – 1943) was a Swiss painter and teacher at the trade school in Basel.  His preferred motifs were mainly landscape and everyday scenes from the area around Basel, the Jura and Markgräflerland . His style was figurative with influences from Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne , Ferdinand Hodler and Cuno Amiet . Arnold Fiechter mainly painted watercolors until 1908, later he added oil paintings. In 1913 he was invited to a watercolor exhibition in Dresden . In 1913 and 1914 he received a federal art scholarship .  Arnold Fiechter developed his own color theory from Goethe's theory of colors. From 1915 to 1943 he was a main teacher in the painting classes of the Basel School of Trade. His successor was the painter Haiggi Heinrich Müller (1885-1960). Arnold Fiechter taught many of the Basel artists, including Jean-François Comment , Kurt Volk , Irène Zurkinden , Jakob Strasser , Hans Weidmann , Max Kämpf , Hermann Anselment , Albert Schnyder and Hamid Zaki (1909–1968).  In 1922, Arnold Fiechter received an order from the Basel City Art Loan for a mural in the station buffet room in 1st class in Basel. Since his studio was too small for this work, he rented a hall in the model fair . There he created the next four years on the triptych oil painting Das Gastmahl . (600 cm × 700 cm, 2 × 170cm × 370 cm). The mural testifies to the strong influence of Italian Quattrocento painting, which at that time served as a model for many Basel artists. The painting suffered great damage due to moisture and was removed and only restored in 1953, mounted on individual panels and reattached to the old location.  In 1935 Arnold Fiechter exhibited ninety-eight of his paintings, which spanned the years 1909 to 1935, in an exhibition managed by Lucas Lichtenhan in the Kunsthalle Basel.