Alphonse Mucha

he was born on the 24th July, 1860 in Ivancice, at that time Südmähren.

With seventeen he left his home to work as a scenery painter on the ring theatre in Vienna. When the theatre burnt down, Mucha lost his job, however, found new employment in the castle which the seat of count Khuen-Belasi was who became the patron of Mucha and sent him even some years later to the study to the Munich academy of arts.

From Munich Alphonse Mucha went in 1887 to Paris to continue his studies in the Académie Julian and then of the Académie Colarossi. When count Khuen stopped paying his calculations, Mucha was made leave the academy and earn his living as an illustrator. In this time Mucha did a lot of sketches, and drawings - studies for the illustrations which were published in ' Le Figaro illustré ',' Le Petit Parisien of illustré' and other magazines. This early Mucha works on his contributions to such magazines, as well as worked on books like from Judith Gauthiers L'Éléphant blanc, in the Mucha then, still in the topically ruling academic, historicizing style.

A committee, arranged by an employee of Lemercier, chose Mucha to sketch a poster for Sarah Bernhardt which signified in 1894 the breakthrough for Alphonse Mucha and introduced in the Czech artist in France the call of a high-powered Jugendstil designer. Sarah Bernhardt was inspired by the work of Mucha and asked him from then on costumes to sketch jewellery things and sceneries as well as posters for her performances.

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Mucha returned in his home Czechoslovakia. He dedicated there some time to the lithography, before he devoted himself to a result of twenty big pictures, the ' Slavic Epos' which took up increasingly his time.

Not long after on the 16th March, 1939 German troops in Czechoslovakia occurred to annex Bohemia and Moravia, Alphonse Mucha died on the 14th July, 1939 in Prag.