Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of Sarah Bernhardt.
He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period.
In the second part of his career, at the age of 57, he returned to his homeland and devoted himself to a series of twenty monumental symbolist canvases known as The Slav Epic, depicting the history of all the Slavic peoples of the world, which he painted between 1912 and 1926. In 1928, on the 10th anniversary of the independence of Czechoslovakia, he presented the series to the Czech nation.
He considered it his most important work (Wiki).
Pojistovna Slavia or Slavia Insurance Company was originally established as Mutual, capital and pension insurance bank Slavia.
Its history dates back to the time of Austria-Hungary.
It was founded in 1868 as one of the first of its kind in the Czech lands.
Its birth was supported by Czech economist and lawyer Frantisek Ladislav Chleborad, but also by Frantisek Palacky.
Slavia Insurance Company operated even after the creation of Czechoslovakia, but its activities were interrupted during the Nazi occupation and subsequently after 1945.
During the communist rule in the then Czechoslovakia, only Ceska Pojistovna was allowed to operate in the country. This situation changed with the restoration of the market economy after 1989.
In 2006, a strong shareholder joined the company and it was incorporated into the financial group SPGroup, which is the majority owner of Pojistovna Slavia (Wiki).
The portrait of Josephine Crane-Bradley (1886-1952) was created during Mucha's stay in the United States of America on the order of her father, Charles R. Crane, who was the artist's friend and patron, who financed the creation of the Slavic Epic.
The portrait was commissioned on the occasion of the daughter's wedding to Harold C. Bradley, professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin.
Mucha portrayed Josephine as the personification of Slavs, and at the same time used her portrait for the poster of the insurance company Slavia, for which he received an order from the Czech republic, and later also for the Czechoslovak one-hundred-crown banknote.
During the lifetime of the Bradley couple, the painting was donated to the National Gallery by the University of Wisconsin (Narodni Galerie Praha).
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