Alphonse Mucha valuation

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was born Alfons Maria Mucha in Ivančice in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire. He worked as a scenery painter in Vienna from 1880, trained at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and settled in Paris in 1887, where at the end of 1894 he was asked at short notice to make a poster for Sarah Bernhardt in Gismonda. Its success brought more posters for Bernhardt and a contract with the printer Champenois, who published his decorative panels, among them The Seasons (1896), The Flowers, The Arts, The Times of Day, Precious Stones and The Moon and the Stars, and in 1902 the pattern book Documents décoratifs. He also designed jewellery, packaging, advertisements and interiors. From 1910 he worked in Bohemia on The Slav Epic, twenty large canvases on the history of the Slavic peoples, painted between 1912 and 1926 and presented to the Czech nation in 1928.

Most of what comes to market is printed work: posters, decorative panels, calendars, menus and book illustrations, printed as colour lithographs. They have been reprinted and reproduced ever since, so the first question is whether a sheet is an original lithograph of the period, which the paper, the printer's line, the size and the printing itself will usually show. The standard reference for the posters and panels is the catalogue by Jack Rennert and Alain Weill, published in 1984. Paintings, pastels and drawings are much rarer and need firm provenance; the Mucha Foundation in Prague, set up by his family, holds a large collection and archive. Lithographs should be checked for fading, trimmed margins, tears, folds and linen backing.