Seated Woman – study for a poster

In the 1890s in Paris, at the time of his greatest fame, Alphonse Mucha produced dozens of posters and other graphic design works. In this drawing, Mucha addressed the question of the geometric stylization of a seated female figure featured within a circle – to which corresponds the semi−circular shape of the armchair with round metal fittings. In his large poster of 1898 advertising Job cigarette papers, he adopted a similar approach to stylizing the figure. Contrary to the poster, in the illustration, in the lower part of the figure, the emphasis on linear construction is confronted with anatomical accuracy; this is perhaps why the drawing was ultimately not transposed into poster form. Nevertheless, the image remains a noteworthy testimony to the artist’s working process used to produce his Parisian posters.