Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha (24 July 1860 – 14 July 1939) was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic designer who lived in Paris during the Art Nouveau period and was most known for his uniquely stylized and ornate theatre posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt. He created illustrations, ads, decorative panels, and designs that became some of the most well-known pictures of the time.

He returned to his birthplace in the second half of his career, at the age of 57, and devoted himself to a series of twenty enormous paintings known as The Slav Epic, chronicling the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between 1912 and 1926. On the tenth anniversary of Czechoslovakia's independence, in 1928, he gave the series to the Czech people. He regarded it as his most important work.

In the 1930s, Hitler and Nazi Germany began to threaten Czechoslovakia. Mucha began a new series, a triptych showing the Ages of Reason, Wisdom, and Love, which he worked on from 1936 to 1938 but never finished. On March 15, 1939, the German army paraded through Prague, and Hitler established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as part of the Greater German Reich at Prague Castle. Mucha was a particular target because of his status as a Slavic nationalist and Freemason. He was arrested, detained for many days, and then released. His condition had deteriorated at that point. He died of pneumonia on 14 July 1939, 10 days before his 79th birthday and just weeks before the onset of World War II. Despite the fact that public gatherings were prohibited, a large throng witnessed his interment in the Slavn Monument of Vyehrad cemetery, which is reserved for prominent personalities in Czech culture.