Seated Woman

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, a study for a poster, 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 lower part of the figure in the illustration, 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.