Alphonse Mucha helped to shape the Art Nouveau movement through his own stylish illustrations which typically captured classicly-dressed women in full length poses. Many of Alphonse Mucha's prints and illustrations featured extremely detailed backgrounds to add more to each work, with some also benefiting from poster art typography. At the start of his professional career, Alphonse Mucha produced many poster advertisements to promote various businesses that had offered him valuable commissions and these posters quickly gained attention within Paris where contemporary art was popular and encouraged.
There was a great following for poster art within France thanks to the achievements of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and so it was easy for Mucha to get attention to his stylish illustrations that followed a consistent style that made his work instantly recognisable as his own.
Alphonse Mucha remains amongst the most influential artists of around the late 19th century and is considered the main leader of the Art Nouveau collection of illustrators, sketchers and painters. Slavia, as shown below, is a poster print which best sums up Mucha's normal approach to his work, with incredible detail right across the work plus a combination of calming colours with in the background plus bold contemporary typography which all together produced work that was charming and extremely contemporary during it's day.
Alphonse Mucha was a proud slavic who created several oil paintings within a collection that were designed to outline the history of his people and this collection remains intact and available on display in his native country that is now the Czech Republic.