Alphonse Mucha's 'Rêverie' — the Art Nouveau daydream incarnate: a serene young woman, hair garlanded in autumn blossom, gazing softly past an album of designs while a great halo of flowering-vine lace blooms behind her. Every line is music, every curve is spring. As a loose print it waits, full of patience, for the frame that will crown it. Her gaze drifts somewhere past the edge of the visible, fixed on the gentle middle distance where all daydreams keep their treasures, and the whole composition seems to exhale rather than depict — a single held sigh given the architecture of line and the perfume of blossom. Mucha's tendrils do not merely decorate her; they grow from her reverie, the halo of flowering vine standing in for the lush, climbing thoughts of a mind happily lost to itself, every curl of lace a sentence in a language made entirely of beauty. To look upon her is to be quietly persuaded that idleness might be the highest art, that to dream well is its own elaborate craft. Unframed, the sheet itself seems to be daydreaming — patiently, gorgeously — of the gilt edge that will one day let it bloom upon a wall.
- Medium
- Lithographic print
- Framing
- Unframed
- Artwork size
- 300 mm × 420 mm
