Summer

Mucha created Summer in 1896 as part of his celebrated Les Saisons series, a set of four decorative panels commissioned as luxury prints by the Parisian publisher Champenois. The series arrived just as Mucha's reputation was rocketing from his overnight success with the Sarah Bernhardt poster of January 1895, and the seasonal allegories gave him space to develop the full grammar of what Paris would soon call le style Mucha: the ornamental arch, the halo-like disc, the figure dissolved into surrounding ornament. Born in Moravia in 1860 and trained in Munich and Paris, Mucha was by 1896 working at the intersection of commercial lithography and fine-art decoration, a position that made him at once the most reproduced and the most formally inventive designer of the Art nouveau moment. Les Saisons proved so popular that Champenois reissued it in multiple formats throughout the decade, and the four panels became a touchstone for the movement's characteristic fusion of the female figure with seasonal flora. Today the original lithographs are held in major print collections across Europe and North America, and Summer in particular is recognised for the audacity of its compressed vertical format, a format that forced Mucha to stack wheat, figure and sky into a column of almost architectural discipline.