Mister Doortree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog has been giving us day after day of Alphonse Mucha (here, here, and here) including the wonderful, atypical, and seldom seen Slav Epic murals. They’re so very different from his decorative work – not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but these come as a big surprise if you’ve never seen anything but his Art Nouveau illustrations and borders.

I was lucky to see this one in Paris; through sheer happenstance there was a Mucha exhibition at the Petit Palais during the week I was there in 1980. As I recall the canvas was edged with great big grommets and the painting was stretched on cords looped through them – it looked like a gigantic, taut sail of mythological wonderment.

That nearly made up for the fact that the Louvre had closed its late nineteenth century collections for some kind of renovations. But I did get two afternoons in the Musee Gustave Moreau, and that was a real pleasure since in those days Moreau was right up my street. I think that his street was the Rue de Rochefoucauld.