Alfons Mucha - Girl 1934, oil on wood panel, 50.5 x 50.5 cm, signed and dated lower left: Mucha / 34 Provenance: significant Moravian collection Exhibited. Consulted by John Mucha, grandson and copyright holder of Alfons Mucha. Certificate of authenticity from John Mucha enclosed. Further consulted by Dr Irena Zantovska Murray HonFRIBA, Professor Jaromir Zemina, Dr Jiri Machalicky and Vladimir Lekes. Expertise by Dr Karel Srp, enclosed. Dr Karel Srp, remarked: "During the 1920s and 1930s, Alfons Mucha very often depicted solitary female figures, many of which made free reference to Slavic mythology, a topic that interested him until the last days of his life. This painting follows his favorite figurative types and scenery, foreshadowed not only by posters, but also by early illustrations for history books. The girl, hiding behind the branches of a tree, stares intently at the viewer. Here, Mucha expressed a tension from which it remains unclear how the girl, dressed in white drapery, might well react. Although only one figure is depicted, the painting has its own spatial depth, delimiting the space for the girl, expressed by the relationship of the tree trunk in the background and the branches in the foreground, on which the girl leans her hands, and at the same time the carefully chosen color tonality in which she plays the visual role of white drapery inside the dark surroundings of the forest. The work is one of the outstanding examples of Alphonse Mucha's painting." Alfons Mucha, one of the world’s most renowned Czech modern artists, began his rise to international fame in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries thanks to his original Art Nouveau decorative work, thus granting his lifelong oeuvre extraordinary attention and fame. He excelled in his versatile creations and in Paris in the 1890s worked mainly as a sought- after illustrator, Art Nouveau decorator or poster creator. Mucha also had a wide range of achievements in the field of small-scale applied arts: he was a brilliant draftsman and designed postcards, various small prints, banknotes and stamps. His life's greatest effort is a series of large-format canvases, The Slavic Epic, on which he worked for almost eighteen years. The completed cycle was first presented in its entirety to the Prague public in the autumn of 1928, on the occasion of the celebration of ten years of independence of the Czechoslovak state, in the Great Hall of the just-completed Veletrzni Palace.