Alphonse Mucha - Svantovit Celebration on the Island of Rügen [1912]

Alphonse Mucha - Svantovit Celebration on the Island of Rügen [1912], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivancice, Moravia, which is near the city of Brno in the modern Czech Republic. It was a small town, and for all intents and purposes life was closer to the 18th than the 19th century. Though Mucha is supposed to have started drawing before he was walking, his early years were spent as a choirboy and amateur musician. It wasn't until he finished high school, needing two extra years to accomplish that onerous task that he came to realise that living people were responsible for some of the art he admired in the local churches. That epiphany made him determined to become a painter, despite his father's efforts in securing him respectable employment as a clerk in the local court.

When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, he was still influential enough to be one of the first people they arrested. He returned home after a Gestapo questioning session and died shortly thereafter on July 14, 1939.

[Egg tempera on canvas, 610 x 810 cm]