Works by Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha became famous in January 1895, when his poster for Sarah Bernhardt went up across Paris, and from then on his theatre posters set a woman's head against a round arch like a halo.

As Mucha later told it, Bernhardt rang the printer Lemercier after Christmas 1894, wanting a new poster for Gismonda by 1 January; with the holidays, none of the regular artists could be had, and Mucha happened to be in the building correcting proofs. She gave him a six-year contract. In La Samaritaine, made for the Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1897, the name SARAH BERNHARDT runs round the arch behind the figure's head, gold stars spill over her shoulder, and the sheet is nearly three times as tall as it is wide.

Advertisers followed, from cigarette papers to bicycles, and those posters too centre on a beautiful woman, her hair usually curling in arabesques across the sheet. He drew a zodiac calendar that the review La Plume brought out in 1897: a woman's head in profile, in a jewelled headdress, inside a ring of the signs, with the months printed below.

Once his illustrations paid, he bought a camera, and he often posed models, photographed them and painted from the photographs. One photograph, titled Tragedie, from 1908, shows a woman wrapped in white hiding her face in her hand. On his American trips he met Charles Crane, who paid for The Slav Epic and had Mucha paint his daughter as Slavia, in white strung with pink ribbons, an eagle at her feet; her face later went onto Czechoslovakia's 100 koruna note.

Sources: Wikipedia, Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery Prague.