Carl Blechen: The Palm House on the Pfaueninsel (Detail), 1834 – Porcelain Art Mug

A glass house in Berlin, painted from the inside. Blechen made it for Friedrich Wilhelm III, who paid a thousand thalers for it, and what the king got was not a view of a building but the experience of standing in one: floor, columns, painted arches, palms overhead, and the light coming down green through the leaves.

The palms were real and expensive. The king had bought a whole French collection on Alexander von Humboldt's advice, and Schinkel built the house on the Pfaueninsel to hold them. It burned down in 1880. The trees, the coloured glass and the Moorish decoration survive only in pictures like this one.

The women on the carpet are Blechen's invention — a European fantasy of the tropics, added to a room that never had them. The Art Institute says so plainly in its own catalogue entry, and so do we.

This mug carries a detail, not the whole canvas: the white column, the palms above it, the blue glass beyond, and the group on the red carpet. The complete painting is shown in the last product image. The printable field on a mug is about nine centimetres high; a canvas of 135 by 126 centimetres would shrink to a stamp, so the mug takes the part of the room the painting is built around.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Carl Blechen, The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, 1834. Oil on canvas, 135 × 126 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, 1996.388. CC0, public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.