Caspar David Friedrich: Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1825 – Porcelain Art Mug

Two figures, seen from behind, stand on a high path and look out at a vast, indeterminate space. The figures are small; the landscape is enormous. A moonlit path and a gnarled, half-uprooted oak frame the field into which they stare, and they carry with them the irreducible privacy of their own contemplation. Friedrich's figures never look back at us; they are absorbed in what lies before them, and we are left to imagine what they see.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is the central figure of German Romantic painting, and Two Men Contemplating the Moon — a composition he returned to in several versions from about 1819 onward — is among the most recognisable images in the history of European landscape art. The two men are usually identified as the painter himself and his pupil August Heinrich, in the years when Friedrich stood closest to the philosophical and literary circles of German Romanticism — the world of Novalis, Schiller and Tieck. Their pose suggests the passing on of a sensibility from one generation to the next, nature approached as a form of spiritual attention. The oak at the right, leafless and ancient, is a recurring Friedrich symbol: endurance, the persistence of the living through adversity, the German forest as both physical fact and national imagination. The version on this mug hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825–30, oil on canvas, 34.9 × 43.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Wrightsman Fund, 2000, acc. no. 2000.51. Public domain (CC0).

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.