Vintage Christmas Mugs: Art, History & Nostalgia

Christmas in art history is not one image but many — the gold ground of early Italian devotional painting, a snowball fight in a medieval health handbook, the Victorian illustrated press, the botanical winter, the folktale. These are antique and vintage Christmas mugs in the older sense of the word: the centuries before Christmas became a brand. Quieter. Stranger. Better.

The oldest picture here is also the least solemn. Around 1390 a Lombard workshop illustrated the rubric Nix et glacies — snow and ice — in a Latin health handbook, and painted a young man and a young woman throwing snowballs at each other on the ice. It is among the earliest surviving depictions of a snowball fight in European art.

Then: Giotto's Madonna of about 1310, painted while the gold was still the point. Rogier van der Weyden's Adoration of 1455, from the Columba altarpiece. Wilson Bentley's snow crystal and his frost, photographed through a microscope in Vermont. Thomas Bewick's robin, cut into the end grain of boxwood in 1797 and coloured after his own watercolour. William H. Bradley's poster for the Christmas 1895 number of The Inland Printer. Matisse's Nuit de Noël of 1952, cut from painted paper with scissors.

Two more belong to the season without naming it. Alfred Stieglitz stood three hours in a blizzard on Fifth Avenue in February 1893 waiting for a horse-drawn coach to come through the snow. Francisco Tamagno drew a couple in mid-flight above a snow slope for the railway's Chamonix poster around 1900.

Each listing names the work, its date, the institution that holds it and its rights status. Fine porcelain, 10 oz, dishwasher and microwave safe.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.