ALPHONSE MUCHA|14 MIN READ

Alphonse Mucha Artworks Explained

On Christmas Eve 1894, a call from Bernhardt's theatre to a Paris print shop gave Mucha his first poster for her. The stories behind these familiar images are just as good as the pictures.

WRITER Moryarty

The Slav Epic: Coronation of Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan as East Roman Emperor. — Alphonse Mucha, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Czech artist Alphonse Mucha gave Art Nouveau the face it is best remembered by: women with spiralling hair, circular halos, flowers and lettering woven into one design. Seven Alphonse Mucha artworks made between 1896 and the early 1900s began as different commissions: a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, advertisements for a spray perfume and for cigarette papers, the lithographs for an entire illustrated book, two prints made for monthly subscribers, and a French government poster inviting travellers to a world's fair in St. Louis.

All seven came out of Paris printing, yet each reached a different public. A theatre poster hung in the street. A book sat in a collector's library. A subscription print arrived inside a monthly magazine. The patrons were different, and so were the paper and the number of people who ever saw each image. What held them together was Mucha's hand.

How Sarah Bernhardt became central to Mucha's career

The play posters advertised roles. Mucha's 1896 profile portrait of the actress was an image of Bernhardt herself. She is shown in profile against a circular halo, with lilies and botanical patterns around her.

The partnership behind it began on Christmas Eve 1894. Mucha was at the Lemercier studio in Paris checking prints when the Théâtre de la Renaissance called: Bernhardt disliked the poster for Gismonda and wanted it redone. He took the job, and the design pleased her enough that she gave him a six-year contract covering posters, stage designs and costumes. The Gismonda poster made him famous in Paris in 1895. It was his first successful poster, and it changed the direction of his career.

The contract's results are well documented in the posters for La Dame aux Camélias, the 1896 production based on Alexandre Dumas's 1848 novel. Bernhardt's Marguerite Gautier was one of the greatest successes of her career, and Mucha's poster for the run at the Théâtre de la Renaissance was printed by the Imprimerie F. Champenois in Paris, in two sheets. When Bernhardt took the play to the United States, the poster went with her and was used again on tour. A copy of it is in the Library of Congress, and it was shown at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2012 in an exhibition on Toulouse-Lautrec and the posters of Paris. In 1896 the partnership also produced the poster for Lorenzaccio, showing Bernhardt in the male title role of Lorenzo de' Medici, a tall figure standing in a niche like an icon, in Alfred de Musset's tragedy set in sixteenth-century Florence.

What was Rodo, and what did Mucha's spray perfume poster offer?

Mucha's 1896 ad for a spray perfume promoted Rodo, a perfume made by the Société des Usines Chimiques du Rhône in Lyon. In the drawing, the woman holds a small bottle with the applicator raised, her eyes closed, cream ruffles gathered at her shoulders and her hair lifting in thick looping waves against a green patterned ground. The design is among the earliest to show what became Mucha's signature: the girl with buoyant hair, the dress with every fold drawn, the lettering drawn to match, the gentle pastel colour.

The product was as new as the drawing. Rodo came in a patented squeeze bottle, an early atomizer, that sprayed the scent straight onto a piece of clothing. The poster's text stresses that the bottle releases the fragrance automatically, and that was the point: the operation of the bottle, not just the smell, was the novelty Mucha was asked to advertise. The perfume went on to become one of the firm's most profitable products early in the twentieth century. It was apparently especially popular in Brazil at carnival time.

The poster design also appeared on the labels of the small glass bottles that held the scent. A woman who bought Rodo saw Mucha's drawing on the street and then again on the small bottle in her hand.

Rodo was part of a wider group of cosmetics commissions. The companies that came to Mucha included Parfumerie Bleuze-Hadancourt and Savonnerie de Bagnolet in France, and Carmichael's Luxuria Bath Tablets in England. His elegant women spoke to female audiences, and firms selling to those audiences noticed. His commercial art found a reliable market there alongside the theatre work.

In 1896 Mucha drew a study in black chalk with pen and ink. An earlier pencil-only study is recorded with the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1978. A more finished study in watercolour and gouache, without any text, is held by the Mucha Trust in Prague.

What Mucha's Job poster advertised and how it spread beyond Paris

The Joseph Bardou Company owned the Job trademark, and Mucha's 1896 poster for the firm's cigarette papers carried it. The design's first purpose was purely commercial, selling one firm's papers, and it grew into one of the most recognisable images Mucha ever drew.

F. Champenois printed it in Paris as a colour lithograph. In the years after 1896, that firm went on to print most of Mucha's Paris posters.

This poster established the image of the Mucha woman: a striking profile with abundant hair that weaves through the design in rhythmic waves. An ornate halo-like motif frames her head, intricate patterns fill the background, and the bold Job lettering becomes a decorative element within the artwork. The Byzantine, mosaic-inspired border gives a commercial sheet the dignity of a much older art, as in Gismonda.

The poster didn't stay in Paris. Numerous later editions were published in different formats for international markets, which is how a design made for one French firm became part of Mucha's worldwide reputation. The reprints kept the image in circulation long after its first posting, and they're a large part of why Job is remembered today as one of his best-known advertisements.

Ilsée, Princesse de Tripoli and the book made in three months

The illustration Ilsee, Princesse de Tripoli belonged not to a wall but to a book. In it, the princess leans forward under a patterned parasol, a blue-green veil over her pale dress, while winged figures hover at the upper edge and a dark vinework border curls around the image. The Parisian publisher Henri Piazza commissioned the author Robert de Flers to write the text, a novelised version of Edmond Rostand's play La Princesse lointaine, which had been written for Sarah Bernhardt in 1895. The play's success led to this edition of 1897, and Piazza asked Mucha to illustrate it throughout.

Rostand built his play on an old legend. The troubadour Jaufre Rudel heard of the beauty of Hodierna, countess of Tripoli, wrote songs of his love from afar, and joined the Second Crusade.

The deadline was extremely tight. By the time De Flers finished the manuscript, Mucha had three months to prepare the lithographs before the edition went to print. The Mucha Foundation counts 134 coloured lithographs in the book. He worked on four stones at once, drawing some images directly on the stone. The ornamental edgings were drawn on tracing paper and continued by draughtsmen in the colours he specified. He later remembered barely finishing a sketch of an ornament before a draughtsman took it from his hands and began work.

His responsibility covered the whole object: the cover, ten decorated initials, the headpieces and tailpieces as well as the illustrations, with the Imprimerie Champenois printing the lithographs on hand presses.

For the title page Mucha borrowed the head from his Sarah Bernhardt poster and stylised it with a diadem of lilies as an emblem. The actress's public image, already central to his theatre work, became part of the book's identity, and the emblem went on to inspire other designers. He reportedly used Bernhardt's likeness for some of the illustrations too.

The first Paris edition was a limited one: 252 numbered copies, finished on 21 May 1897, with a colophon recording that the plates were destroyed after printing. The critics received the book with enthusiasm, and Czech and German editions followed in Prague in 1901, published by B. Koci.

Photographic selfportrait of Alfons Mucha, 1928 (2) — Alphonse Mucha, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Salomé and the monthly prints made for collectors

This 1897 print of the dancer with a tambourine isn't a poster. It was issued in June 1897 in number 2 of L'Estampe Moderne, a monthly Paris publication, and its first audience wasn't passers-by but subscribers who collected contemporary prints. The print shows a soft peach garment, pale green drapery, and a tambourine with a dangling tassel. It was made to be kept, handled and framed, not pasted to a street wall.

The series was run by the publishers C. H. Masson and Henri Piazza, with the sheets printed by the Imprimerie Champenois. Mucha's contribution reached readers through an organised publishing enterprise: each monthly issue carried four prints, and the programme ultimately comprised one hundred plates by many artists. Buying the magazine meant building a small collection month by month.

A small detail of the impression shows how authorship was made visible. Mucha signed Salomé on the lithographic stone, lower left, so the signature came out as part of the printed image itself, not added by hand afterwards.

Surviving impressions sit in major collections. The Museum of Modern Art holds a copy of Salomé, a gift from Mr. and Mrs. E. Powis Jones, and the Victoria and Albert Museum holds another.

How Flaubert's Salammbô became a print for subscribers

Mucha's Salammbô: The Incantation takes its subject from Gustave Flaubert's novel Salammbô, set in ancient Carthage. The print shows a tall woman in a pale robe with her arms opened outward, patterned strands gathering around her, flowers, vessels and draped fabric at her feet, and a small green bird among the curved borders. It was made as a colour lithograph for L'Estampe Moderne, the monthly Paris publication that ran from 1897 to 1899, and it appeared in volume 1, number 6, in October 1897, printed in five colours by the Imprimerie Champenois and distributed by Masson & Piazza.

Its role in the magazine was specific. The print was a premium plate, given to readers who took out a one-year subscription, and it was also distributed as a free supplement with one issue. The image worked as a reward: a subscriber's loyalty was repaid in pictures, and this was one of the prizes.

The connection to Flaubert's novel was made physically, not only in the subject. One documented impression retains its protective silk tissue printed with the passage in which Salammbô goes out onto the balcony of her palace, so the reader met the print and the novel's words together.

The edition had degrees of luxury. A recorded deluxe impression is described as part of a fifty-copy issue on Japan paper, with wide margins and heightened with gold, offered as the free first prize to subscribers for the whole year. One dealer's records put the ordinary issue at 2,000 copies, sold at 3.50 francs, against the fifty deluxe sheets on Japan paper.

The print also has a documented collecting history. The Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University holds an impression bought with purchase funds in 1959, a later chapter in a story that began as a free gift inside a magazine sixty-two years earlier.

Why Mucha advertised an American world's fair to French travellers

Mucha's invitation to the St. Louis world's fair was issued under the French Republic's Ministry of Commerce as official publicity for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Its job was to encourage French audiences to travel from Paris to St. Louis for the fair. It was advance publicity, issued before the event to sell a journey, not a product.

The occasion was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, France's sale of its territory to the United States. In the centre, a Native American chief and an idealized woman clasp hands, figures meant as symbols of unity and progress rather than portraits, with a circular halo and ornamental borders carrying the Art Nouveau rhythm. The Milwaukee Art Museum reads the young woman as the United States, watched over by a Native American spirit.

Beneath the image, the poster tells the traveller something very practical: the journey from Paris to St. Louis takes six days by steamer and one day by railway. The text announces the exposition running from 30 April to 30 November 1904, and the poster was printed by F. Champenois in Paris, a government poster from a commercial printer.

The St. Louis project was also the beginning of Mucha's American years. Between 1904 and 1909 he made five trips to the United States, seeking funds for his Slav Epic, and the American millionaire Charles R. Crane became its sponsor. A poster inviting French travellers across the Atlantic came just before Mucha's own crossings to America.

Copies are now kept in respected public collections. The Saint Louis Art Museum holds one, acquired with memorial funds honouring David R. Francis, the fair's president. The funds were a gift from his granddaughter Alice P. Francis. The Milwaukee Art Museum and the Library of Congress in Washington hold copies as well.

One hand worked for a theatre, perfume and paper firms, a publisher and a ministry, and the pictures still read as one artist's work. Browse our Alphonse Mucha collection to choose the one you want on your wall.

Did you know?

In Paris, the Art Nouveau style was so strongly identified with Mucha that people simply called it le style Mucha.
Mucha called Sarah Bernhardt "La divine Sarah".
Mucha had little or no advertising experience when he drew the Gismonda poster, yet that design set the standard for the decades that followed.
Mucha was born in Ivančice in 1860 and died in Prague in 1939.
He made a second Job poster in 1898, with a dark-haired woman in an orange strapless dress inside a circle.
JOB was one of the most popular cigarette-paper brands in France when Mucha drew its poster.
In the Paris edition of Ilsée, many of the images were printed on both sides of the sheet, wrapping the text in decoration.

Common questions about Mucha's art

Are these Mucha works prints or paintings? The designs here are colour lithographs, each printed from stones. L'Estampe Moderne asked each artist to make a print specially for the magazine, unlike Les Maîtres de l'Affiche, which reproduced existing posters. Works like Salomé were conceived as prints from the start.

Which is Mucha's most famous artwork? The Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt is the one that made his name, and the Mucha Foundation dates his Paris fame from 1895. Among his advertisements, Job is the one the Foundation calls perhaps his best-known poster.

How many lithographs did Mucha make for L'Estampe Moderne? The Museum of Modern Art's record describes Salomé as one of a set of four lithographs Mucha contributed to the series. The publication as a whole gathered one hundred plates from many artists, four prints to each monthly issue.

What did Mucha's St. Louis poster advertise? It advertised the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world's fair in Forest Park, St. Louis, that drew about 19.7 million visitors and 62 participating countries. The fair opened on 30 April 1904 and ran to 1 December 1904, one day longer than the period announced on the poster.

Who else published prints in L'Estampe Moderne? The magazine mixed Mucha with other well-known illustrators and printmakers of the day, among them Rhead, Meunier, Ibels, Steinlen, Willette and Grasset. Together they turned each monthly issue into a small survey of contemporary French printmaking.

Where can you see Mucha's original artworks? Major impressions sit in public collections: the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum hold Salomé, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University holds the Salammbô print, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum and Library of Congress hold the fair poster. The Mucha Foundation places his breakthrough years in Paris between 1895 and 1903, the period that produced nearly all of these works.

About the author

We're the team behind Moryarty Vintage Posters, a European company founded in 2015 with shops in Barcelona and Lisbon. We find our posters in libraries, museums, online collections, private collections and markets, restore each one by hand so its colours stay close to the original, and print every poster in our Barcelona workshop on museum-quality matte paper. Mucha's Paris is a world we return to often, and these seven stories are the ones we most enjoy telling about it.

Sources

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