Art worth stealing

How Alphonse Mucha made Sarah Bernhardt immortal.

One fun way to measure the success of a marketing campaign is by how many people try to steal the ads. When Alphonse Mucha’s first posters hit the streets of Paris on New Year’s Day, 1895, they were scraped off the walls by collectors within hours. Now they’re free and available to you in the public domain!

The Muse

It could be said that Sarah Bernhardt was the single biggest contributor to Mucha. At the time Mucha painted her, the French actress was already a global superstar, on top of being delightfully quirky. Bernhardt famously slept in a coffin to “understand her mortality” and kept a personal zoo that included chameleons, monkeys, and at least one cheetah.

On Christmas Eve, 1894, she called her printer asking for a new poster. Because every other artist was already home for the holidays, Mucha was the only one left in the shop. He had never designed a commercial poster, but couldn’t turn down the opportunity. With a week’s deadline, he created a massive Byzantine-inspired masterpiece. Bernhardt loved it so much she signed him to a six-year contract, declaring that he had made her immortal.

Delightful, Chaotic Creation

For a time, Mucha shared a studio with famous French painter Paul Gauguin. This combined studio was a place of creative chaos. There is a famous photograph of Gauguin sitting at Mucha’s harmonium (a reed-based keyboard) and playing music while naked from the waist down.

Mucha himself spent his days drawing beautiful women to sell champagne and cigarette papers, yet he spent his nights with the Freemasons. He actually hated the term “Art Nouveau,” which he felt sounded like a passing fad.

Mucha’s Artistic Characteristics

The Q Formula

Mucha almost always designed his images around a Q shape. This involves a halo or framing the head of the subject, with the body forming the tail of the letter. It creates an immediate focal point that locks the viewer’s eyes onto the subject while bringing the eye down the canvas in a sensual curve.

Thick Outlines

In order to make sure the subject of a painting stood out among a busy background, Mucha relied on thick dark outlines to create a sense of separation. This would become an iconic element of his style and Art Nouveau in general.

Mucha famously wanted his art to be on every street corner, accessible to the common person. Today, the public domain fulfills his wish to keep his art alive and beautify the world we all live in!

Whether you want a new desktop background, poetic inspiration, or just something beautiful to look at, you can download my personal archive of 121 high-resolution Mucha images for free. No scraping posters off walls required!

Download images here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dgksCIJCNlk4uKmqpdvAphg2n8EZ4PJ1?usp=drive_link