Page:Historical paintings of the Slavic nations by Alfons Mucha (1921).pdf/16

 Exposition Universelle, 1900. Here at last was a congenial commission. A profound student of the history of his race, and familiar from childhood with the myths and legends of the Slavs of southeastern Europe, it is natural that these panels should have been executed more as a labour of love than in an official or perfunctory spirit. In order to refresh his memory of native costume, and of forms floral and architectural, the artist made an extended tour of the country. And yet the charm of the completed compositions lay not in their fidelity to the actual, but in their flowing rhythmic grace, and their felicitous coloration, grouping, and arrangement. They were in fact the feature of that fantastic, red-roofed, blue-walled pavilion which stood in the rue des Nations between the more pretentious Austrian and Hungarian palaces.

Appropriately installed in commodious quarters at number 6, rue Val-de-Grâce, Mucha next began working upon a series of decorations for the Assumptionist Church of the Virgin in Jerusalem, and also on a cycle of graphic compositions depicting symbolically the Seven Deadly Sins. Successful exhibitions of his work at La Bodinière and the Salon des Cent had meanwhile attracted to him numerous pupils, and about this period he opened an atelier in the passage Stanislas, whither focked students from nearly every country in Europe, not to mention numerous admiring Americans of both sexes.

The Val-de-Grâce studio, which one instinctively recalls in reviewing Mucha’s Paris days, was typical of the man and his art. The roses and clematis that during spring and summer beckoned to the door,