Although it is difficult to date Winifred’ s still life paintings, it seems likely that Winter Landscape was painted circa 1971 at her Cumberland home, Bankshead. The mauve and blue bulbs are Iris Reticulata. Winifred planted bulbs of snowdrops, crocus and iris in the autumn and would paint them as they emerged in early Spring. Her studio at Bankshead was upstairs offering an arresting view of the landscape looking towards Cold Fell in the north Pennine hills. Flowers set before this wild vista were an abiding source of inspiration. 'I like painting flowers - I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower - and I think I know why this is so. Flowers mean different things to different people … - to me they are the secret of the cosmos. This secret cannot be put into image, far less into the smallness of words - but I try to. Their silence says to me - "My rootlets are moving in the dark, in the wet, cold, damp mud - My leaflets are moving in the brightness of the sky - My flowerface has seen the darkness which cannot be seen, and the brightness that is too bright to see - has seen earth to sun and sun to earth'. (quoted from Andrew Nicholson ed., Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings, by Winifred Nicholson, London, 1987). On the back of Winter Landscape is a study of a child, it is likely to be Kate Nicholson, the second child of Ben and Winifred who was born in 1929.