The Four Seasons (1896)

The story of The Four Seasons (1896)

Four women stand in four narrow arches: Spring with a lyre strung with blossoms, Summer trailing her feet in a pool with poppies in her hair, Autumn reaching for grapes, and Winter wrapped in a cloak warming a small bird in her hands. Mucha designed the set in 1896, a year after Gismonda made him famous, as decorative panels that Paris shops sold by the thousand for people to hang at home. This is the original version, and it is the one that fixed the idea of a Mucha woman: long hair, long neck, a halo of ornament, and an air of not being in any hurry.

On a wall, the panel is tall, narrow, and gentle. The colors move from Spring's greens and whites through Summer's warm gold and Autumn's russet to Winter's blue-gray and snow, with the whole set held together by a pale, paper-toned ground. It suits a narrow wall between windows, a stair landing, a bathroom, a hallway, or the wall beside a bed, and it belongs in Art Nouveau, Victorian, cottage, and softly romantic interiors. Because the image is more than twice as tall as it is wide, we offer it in the Mini at 8 × 16.2 in, the Petite at 11 × 22.3 in, and the Small at 12 × 24.3 in. The Small is the one for a wall of its own; the Petite is ideal next to a doorway or a mirror.

Mucha's Gismonda is the poster that came first, and Zodiac is the circular ornament from the same decade. Our studio's Solstice Muse carries the same tall, decorative idea into a modern palette. More from Alphonse Mucha.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of an original lithograph, so the four panels keep the soft ink and paper tone of the 1896 printing.