Edvard Munch – Harry Count Kessler Mug

Harry Graf Kessler (1868–1937) was one of the most remarkable figures in European cultural life in the decades around 1900: a German diplomat, art patron, publisher, and diarist who moved between Paris, London, Berlin, and Weimar with an ease that reflected both his cosmopolitan upbringing and his genuine centrality to the culture of his time. He knew Rodin, Maillol, Hofmannsthal, Gordon Craig, and virtually everyone else of consequence in European art and letters, and his published diaries — written in German with a novelist's eye for scene and character — remain among the most vivid accounts of that era.

Edvard Munch painted Kessler's portrait in 1906, during a period when Kessler was active in Weimar cultural politics and had recently commissioned Munch to produce a frieze for Max Reinhardt's Chamber Theatre in Berlin. The mug carries the full-length standing portrait, not the later bust-length variant: the sitter is present at his own scale, and the painter's eye is present too, and the two do not entirely agree.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Edvard Munch, portrait of Harry Graf Kessler, 1906, oil on canvas. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.