These staff-led gallery talks invite you to take a closer look at a selected artwork or theme within the exhibitions or collection. Each session offers focused insights, encouraging deeper connections with the art and new ways of seeing.
For this session, Curator Kelli Bodle traces how Alphonse Mucha turned staged photographs into finished designs, then links that working method to a late 19th-century Japanese cloisonné vase and the poster Precious Stones: Emerald. Mucha routinely directed models, photographed them in costume, and mined those images for pose, proportion, and ornament.
In Emerald, look for the tight palette, the Byzantine-like halo, and the serpent woven through the model’s hair, all keyed to the gemstone’s color and mood. The session considers how cloisonné’s enamel surfaces, bird-and-flower motifs, and jewel tones echo in Mucha’s graphic language, using examples of Japanese vases shown alongside his works in Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line.
Image Left: Alphonse Mucha, "Model posing with a Japanese vase at Mucha's studio in the rue du Val-de-Grâce" (detail), Paris, c. 1898, photographic panel (c) Mucha Trust 2022
Image Right: Alphonse Mucha, "Precious Stones: Emerald" (detail), 1900, color lithograph. Courtesy of the Mucha Foundation
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