Signed vertically lower right: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and inscribed Winter

Watercolour over pencil on light brown tracing paper, 29.5 by 16 cm (11 ¾ by 6 ¼ ins)

Provenance: deaccessioned from the collection of the Ralph T.Coe Center for the Visual Arts, Santa Fe

The present work is one of three closely related drawings on the subject of Winter executed by Mackintosh in around 1895. The design would go on to become one of his most celebrated contributions to a publication called The Magazine, a highly influential group project, put together at the Glasgow School of Art by the artist and several of his fellow students (his future wife Margaret McDonald and her sister Frances amongst them). The Magazine was of central importance in helping develop Mackintosh’s distinct style as an artist, architect and designer. Each of the three designs were executed on near-identically sized sheets of tracing paper: in addition to this version is one contained within the pages of the Spring 1896 edition of The Magazine itself (collection of Glasgow School of Art (ref.MC/G/10)) and another in the collection of the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow (GLAHA:41033). The present work differs slightly to the other versions, losing the margin to the right of the two nude figures with the title and vertical signature contained in the lower part of the drawing and inscribed with the artist’s particular style of graphic lettering. His winter design acts as a pendant to a design of Spring from around the same date, both depicting similar primeval nude female figures. Roger Billcliffe has described the image as follows: “Each of the figures is shown living below the ground, stretching as if awaking from a long sleep…the sun is just appearing above the horizon to welcome the first signs of the new year.”