Private Collection, France (acquired by 1963)

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1963, no. 562, illustrated n.p.

Canvas has not been lined. Canvas is slightly buckled on its stretcher. Impasto is well-preserved. Surface is slightly dirty. Under UV light: some pigments and a few extremely minor strokes of possible inpainting fluoresce. Overall the work is in very good condition.
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A recollection of Russia painted while Marc Chagall lived in France, L'Hiver (La pendule ailée) combines the artist's personal memories with the symbolic object reconfigurations of Surrealism. The clock returned to Chagall's pictures in the 1930s after an initial appearance in a 1914 painting. In its later iterations the clock is accompanied by a number of whimsical accoutrements, including wings, boots, and, in the famous Time Is A River Without Banks from 1930, an enormous winged fish. In the present work, the clock is winged and given the form of a woman.

Franz Meyer provides an account of the clock motif in Chagall's oeuvre: "What does the wall clock stand for? First, it is an item of the mysterious world of childhood, a great, strange presence in the parents' sitting room filled with an incomprehensible life of its own. This makes it a being belonging to a different stage of reality, comparable to the angels who break into this world from the other. At the same time it announces the hour and so demarcates the diffuse stream that governs all human destiny. But in that very way it draws attention to the limits of the world of time and separates the human world from the external. Thus, the clock becomes the symbol of the frontier between this world and the next, between time and eternity" (Franz Meyer, op. cit., p. 379).