Jost Amman

Dr Matthias Konrad Hubert Rech (1879-1946), Bonn (L.2745a, on the old mount),

thence by descent;

with Thomas le Claire, Kunsthandel, Hamburg, by 1999,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Although the majority of Amman's surviving drawings are executed primarily in fairly densely worked pen and ink, extensively hatched and with little use of wash, other examples of the combination of media seen here do exist. Emmanuelle Brugerolles and David Guillet, writing in the monumental catalogue published to accompany the important exhibition of German drawings held at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2012-13, propose that these drawings, which include the Orpheus and Euridice in the École des Beaux-Arts and others in Weimar, Veste Coburg and elsewhere, were probably made, late in Amman's career, as designs for silversmiths' work.¹

When the drawing was sold in 1999, the attribution to Amman was confirmed by Dr. Tilman Falk of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, and by Ilse O'Dell-Franke, who wrote a number of articles on the drawings of Amman.

The subject, a woman in a landscape warming her hands over a pot of hot soup, has traditionally been identified as an allegory of winter. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, numerous series of prints, paintings and stained-glass roundels representing the four seasons were produced, in several of which the image of winter took the form of a similar allegorical figure.

^1.Paris, École des Beaux-Arts, inv. Mas.29; E. Brugerolles, De la Réforme à la Guerre de Trente Ans. Dürer et son temps. Dessins allemands de l'École des Beaux-Arts, exh. cat., Paris, Beaux-Arts de Paris, pp. 154-160, cat. 23