Silver Mug c. 1937

Richard Schoene made this drawing, titled *Silver Mug,* at some point during his long life. I look at this image and I wonder what it was like to sit and really look at a mug for an extended period of time. A simple object can become mysterious if you spend long enough trying to capture its likeness. Schoene’s faint rendering makes me think of Morandi’s still lifes, which meditate on the form of the everyday. There’s something quite tender about the way the curves and the lines of the mug are gently shaded and described. What does it mean to memorialize a mug in this way? Maybe Schoene saw some potential for sublimity, that the mug contains, like a poem, a whole world within its simple form.