Beautiful Art Mugs: Coffee Mugs with Reproductions of Artworks by Van Gogh, Monet, Degas

His other two famous paintings with night views and star-studded skies are Café Terrace at Night and Starry Night over the Rhone, both painted in September 1888 in Arles.

If you want to see a really good movie about Van Gogh, I recommend Robert Altman’s 1990 film Vincent & Theo, with Tim Roth as van Gogh and Paul Rhys as his brother Theo.

The Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted over 250 Water Lilies. The famous image shown below, dating from 1906, is now exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago. It doesn’t go around the mug because it’s almost square in shape. Beware of mugs where this image is stretched to fit the entire girth of the mug – the result is rather ugly. Note that you can increase the size of the artwork to get it closer to the rim. You can also move the image to the right, if you want to.

Monet painted his “water landscapes,” as he referred to them, in his garden at Giverny between 1899 and 1926. In the last years of his life his sight was severely affected by cataracts. The images become larger and larger, and rather blurry.

Like Monet, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) had failing eyesight, which became manifest as early as the 1880s. In the last decades of his life, his pastels become looser and looser. The quality of the brushstrokes in his paintings may suggest that he was a spontaneous artist like Monet. But nothing could be further from the truth. “No art was less spontaneous than mine,” Degas said. His paintings and drawings are carefully composed, and they are inventions rather than quick renderings of fleeting scenes. Degas, this painter of ballet dancers, whom he represented in more than half of his works after observing them at the old Paris Opera as they were performing on stage, rehearsing, or relaxing, brought much to the final compositions from memory or various sketches done at different times. When the Paris Opera was destroyed in a fire in 1873, he continued to use it as a setting in his works.

Degas is beautiful not only for his brushstrokes or the wonderful quality of his pastels, but also for his compositions: asymmetrical, with unusual viewpoints, and bodies cropped at the margins, showing the influence of both Japanese woodcut prints, which circulated in 19^th-century (van Gogh had a whole collection of them) and the medium of photography, which Eadweard James Muybridge used to capture motion. Degas’s paintings, while not quick representations of a moment in time, were, however, about showing the beauty of many stolen moments in the life of the ballet corps of the Paris Opera.