Wilson Bentley: Frost, c. 1910 – Porcelain Art Mug

This is not a snow crystal. It is frost — ice grown straight out of the air onto a cold surface. A snowflake falls once and is gone in seconds. Frost builds over hours, fern upon fern, until the whole pane is filled.

Wilson Bentley was a farmer in Jericho, Vermont, in the snowbelt — about three metres of snow a year. In 1885, aged nineteen, he bolted a bellows camera to a microscope and made the first photograph of a snow crystal that anyone had ever made. He kept at it for forty-six winters and more than five thousand crystals.

Snow was not all he photographed. He turned the same apparatus on dew, on raindrops and on frost — the whole of what water does when it is left alone in cold air. These are the plates nobody quotes, and they are the ones that show him as a photographer rather than a collector.

This one is frost, made around 1910. The ferns run edge to edge: no centre, no border, no right way up. The pattern simply carries on past the frame, which is why it is printed here as a band that runs round the mug rather than as a picture on the front. Wherever you set the mug down, there is more of it.

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.

From the same series: Snowflake, c. 1905 · Dew on a Spider Web, c. 1910

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865–1931), [Frost], c. 1910. Gelatin silver print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2015.201, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2015. Open Access, CC0.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.