Girl in Oriental Costume

Almost everyone knows Mucha for his posters, the tall panels of dreaming women wrapped in flowers and haloes that came to define Art Nouveau. This is the other Mucha, the trained easel painter who made quiet oils like this one. A girl in eastern costume leans her head on her hand, her eyes lowered over an ornately decorated book, and the pleasure of the picture is all in its surfaces, the folds of heavy fabric, the ornament in her headdress and on the binding. Exotic oriental subjects like this were standard fare in the Paris and Munich studios where Mucha trained and scraped a living in the 1880s and early 1890s, before he became famous almost overnight as a poster designer. The taste for pattern and elegant line that fills those posters is already here, worked out in oil paint.