Henri Matisse: Nuit de Noël, 1952 – Porcelain Art Mug

In 1952, Time magazine commissioned Henri Matisse to design a stained-glass window for its New York offices — a commission he accepted at the age of eighty-two, working from his apartment in Nice where illness had largely confined him for the previous decade. The resulting design, Nuit de Noël (Christmas Night), was completed in 1952 and translated into glass the following year. Like all of Matisse's late work, it was made using the cut-out technique: shapes cut from paper painted in pure gouache, then arranged and rearranged until the composition resolved itself. The design was subsequently issued as a lithograph, in editions of 1951 and 1958, reproducing the brilliant yellows and blues of the stained glass in a form that could be widely distributed.

Nuit de Noël is a composition of extraordinary simplicity and radiance: abstract leaf and star forms in saturated yellow against a ground of deep blue, the whole suggesting candlelight, cold sky, and the particular stillness of the Christmas season without depicting any of them directly. It is Matisse at his most distilled — the reduction of a complex visual idea to its irreducible essentials — and it demonstrates that the cut-out method, which had begun as a practical adaptation to physical limitation, had become the most expressive instrument of his final years.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. Light in the hand, about 200 g, with a thin, smooth rim: lighter than a diner mug, finer at the lip. If you want a heavy café mug, this is the wrong one. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

From the same series: La Gerbe, 1953 · Icarus, 1947 · Self-Portrait, 1930 · The Snail, 1953 · Blue Nude II, 1952 · Les Velours, 1947 · La Danse, 1909 · La Danse (Barnes Mural), 1933

Henri Matisse, Nuit de Noël (Christmas Night), maquette 1952, lithograph 1958. Public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom; Matisse died in 1954. This mug is not sold into the United States.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.