Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Alphonse Mucha is acclaimed for his distinctly stylized and decorative Art Nouveau illustrated posters and prints — particularly those depicting beautiful French actress and famous artists’ muse Sarah Bernhardt. His work remains widely loved by everyone from bohemian students to serious collectors. 

Mucha and his contemporaries treated femininity as the antidote to the impersonal, masculine world of the industrial revolution — it was to be celebrated and embraced. He fervently believed that art is a crucial, enjoyable benefit to humankind, and it should be accessible to as many people as possible.

Mucha showed an early talent for drawing. Rejected when he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1878, he traveled to Vienna — two years later at the age of 19 — and found work painting theater backdrops. After a tragic fire that destroyed the theater that employed him, he returned home and began painting portraits. Count Eduard Khuen Belasi hired Mucha to paint a series of murals for his residence. 

In 1885, the Count sent Mucha to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts — paying his tuition and living expenses. Mucha moved to Paris in 1888 to continue his studies, where he shared a studio with Paul Gauguin. There, he became enamored with the nude female form and allegorical studies. He enjoyed some financial success with magazine illustration work, which led to lucrative book illustration commissions. One of Mucha’s illustrations for the book Scenes and Episodes of German History received a medal of honor at the 1894 Paris Salon of Artists.

In 1894, Mucha began a six-year contract for the acclaimed stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, creating posters for her shows and tours. His first poster was an immediate sensation and cemented his fame in the Art Nouveau poster artist community.

Mucha designed some of the most famous posters of the era — a time when these works were key to the fabric of the cosmopolitan thoroughfare in the French capital. He created advertisements for JOB cigarette papers, Ruinart champagne, Lefèvre-Utile biscuits and Moët-Chandon champagne. Although Mucha is renowned for his posters, he spent the latter half of his life on decorative panel works and Czech nationalist artworks — many of them in the collection at the Mucha Museum in Prague.

Find original Alphonse Mucha nude prints, figurative prints, wall decorations and other art on 1stDibs.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.