Job Cigarettes, 1896
Alphonse Mucha
A woman's hair spirals into smoke across one of Mucha's best-known adverts.
A woman with cascading, curling hair savours a cigarette amid Mucha's swirling arabesques and haloed patterning. This 1896 poster is Art Nouveau at its most seductive and decorative — the female figure dissolved into rhythmic, golden line.
What you're looking at
The hair does the work. It leaves her head as hair and becomes pure arabesque, indistinguishable from the smoke, filling most of the poster with rhythm rather than subject. Behind her the word JOB is tiled edge to edge as a flat repeating monogram. It is a lithograph, printed in flat areas of colour with a hard black outline, so it has no brushwork at all to look into.
On a Frame TV
About 7:10. Matted file. Flat colour and heavy outline mean it holds its shape from any distance and in any light — one of the easiest works here to place.
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
More like this
Other works in the collection, starting with Alphonse Mucha.
