Late nineteenth century Paris was a thriving, exciting place for artists, and Alphonse Mucha was the most celebrated artist working in the city. Everywhere you looked his posters and advertisement designs caught the eye and influenced popular culture. He was the favorite artist of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt and she contracted him for six years to design all her posters, costumes, set designs, programs, and more. However he was much more than just a phenomenally successful commercial artist, Mucha was also a painter of great epic compositions that celebrated his native Czech heritage. After being so very fashionable, in time his work inevitably came to be seen as old-fashioned and Mucha’s paintings disappeared from the mainstream until his work was rediscovered during the fad for Art Nouveau in the late 1960s. Since then his work has been treated with the respect it deserves and now it evokes turn of the century Paris with all its glamor and excitement, more than that of any other artist.
