Vintage Poster Archives
Mucha Laurel 1901 | Art Nouveau Decorative Panel
Mucha Laurel 1901 | Art Nouveau Decorative Panel
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A woman's profile occupies a circular medallion at the centre of the sheet, its background modelled in close-set mosaic tilework, ochre, umber and sage, arranged in the scroll-and-lozenge patterns Mucha borrowed from Byzantine apse decoration. Her auburn hair is dressed with laurel leaves, a pink ribbon and a single green-and-yellow flower; long terracotta-rose ribbons fall behind her. Surrounding the medallion, a dense rectangular field of grey-green laurel foliage on ivory completes a composition that reads as much as a decorative object as an illustration.
Designed in 1901 and printed by Imp. F. Champenois in Paris, Laurel is one of a textless pair, the companion piece is Ivy, belonging to the genre Mucha and Champenois developed together: the panneau décoratif, a poster without commercial text, made for the sole purpose of decorating interior walls. The Mucha Foundation catalogues it as a colour lithograph, 53 x 39.5 cm; the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds an example in its prints collection. The design shares its formal vocabulary with Mucha's Byzantine Heads series of 1897: profile within a circular halo, mosaic ground, architectural foliate border. In Laurel the palette is held to a quieter, silvery register, sage, ivory, ochre and rose, that gives the image a gentler presence than the more saturated Byzantine works.
Reproduced from a high-resolution archival source on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks for lasting colour fidelity. The matte surface and natural white tone of the paper complement the restrained palette of the original lithograph.
Resonates with collectors of Belle Époque graphic art, those drawn to the formal geometry of Art Nouveau interior decoration, and anyone who values the decorative panel as a design form in its own right.
