A winter scene for the winter solstice

Around Dec. 21, the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth tilts the farthest away from the sun in the path of its orbit, and we experience the shortest day of the year.

This winter solstice, we’re enjoying the calm of this winter scene with a mixed-media print of a tree and birds. Werner Drewes created it around 1965, possibly for a card.

It’s in Drewes’ papers in our Archives of American Art, which include his scrapbooks, sketchbooks and photos, as well as quite a few Christmas cards.

Drewes was a painter, printmaker and designer. He was born in Canig, Germany, in 1899, and came to the U.S. in 1930. A founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, Drewes was also a university instructor and the director of graphic art for the WPA Federal Art Project in New York in 1940. In his art, he worked with multiple kinds of media—making woodcuts, etchings, watercolors, collages and more—and moved between abstraction and figurative work.

In 1936, he wrote this for an exhibition brochure:

“What is the mystery underlying the Architecture of our Universe? What are the laws which create the pattern of the frost which forms on our windows? What causes the stars to stay in their orbit? What is it which creates joy and sorrow within us?…All these are problems belonging to the world we live in and which should concern the artist, as well as those problems of sunlight or the growth of a tree. But art is also a world with its own laws, whether they underlie a painting of realistic or abstract forms.”

Many of Drewes’ pieces are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection.

Learn about the science of the solstice from the Smithsonian Science Education Center.

Explore hundreds of holiday cards from across the Smithsonian’s collections—no postage required.