Lovers, Poster Maquette: Men and a Woman Surrounding Musicians

Gentlemen and ladies in formal dress gather in a circle around three string musicians. Music and intimate conversation. This is the refined evening salon of high society at its most elegant.

This drawing is a preparatory study for the 1895 comedy poster Amants (The Lovers). The artist was Alphonse Mucha.

In the mid-1890s, around 1893 to 1894, he maintained a studio on Rue de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. It served as a vibrant hub where Parisian bohemian artists gathered—photographers, future pupils, and one particularly famous painter: Paul Gauguin.

At the time, Gauguin was struggling with poverty and a crisis of artistic direction. As a close friend of Mucha, he frequented the studio, often taking delight in playing Mucha’s harmonium, a pump reed organ.

This free exchange between talents of different disciplines offered Mucha rich inspiration.

To lend a realistic conviction to his graphic works, Mucha took a bold step: he introduced the cutting-edge technology of photography into his studio. Photographing models and friends himself, he amassed a vast collection of glass plate negatives. Through photography, he studied the natural overlapping of figures and the subtle interplay of their gazes, elevating poster design from flat graphic illustration into the construction of a modern visual space.