Alphonse Mucha ( 1860 - 1939)

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)
Czech painter, illustrator and graphic artist. Worked in Paris during the Art Nouveau period and best known for his distinctly stylized and decorative posters. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, and designs, which became among the best-known images of the period. In the second part of his career, at the age of 43, he returned to his homeland of Bohemia-Moravia region in Austria and devoted himself to painting a series of twenty monumental canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between 1912 and 1926. In 1928, on the 10th anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the series to the Czech nation. He considered it his most important work.