Henri Matisse – Nuit de Noël 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. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Henri Matisse, Nuit de Noël (Christmas Night), maquette 1952, lithograph 1958. Public domain.