Bénédictine

Bénédictine is a beautiful lithograph poster by Alphonse Mucha from 1898. It perfectly captures the Art Nouveau movement of the late 19th century and also is highly typical of this artist's own career.

You will discover a huge amount of detail within Bénédictine, though your initial attention will be grabbed by the bottle of Dom which dominates the centre of the design. The bottle is flanked on either side by two attractive young women who go about their day with an elegant charm that is entirely appropriate to the purpose of this advertisement poster. They are entirely desirable, and so the intention is to place the same level of desire upon the drink that sits beside them. Their outfits are elegant and detailed, with patterns throughout the accompanying accessories. They share flower petals with each other in order to strengthen the feminine nature of this artwork and there are additional patterns across the background, as well as the title of the piece.

Artist Mucha would receive a large number of commissions to promote various products and services through his poster designs. These would then be printed up and displayed around city centres, with locations carefully selected based on the particular attributes of each brand. Paris would give the biggest amount of work and at that time is was seen by many as the cultural centre of the western world, attracting all the major companies to promote their various products here. The companies would vary in type, but would normally be around aspirational products aimed at the middle classes, or those lower down who wanted to reach that level. There would be travel companies, promoting various locations, as well as food and drink items. Theatre would also play an important role too, with theatre shows seeking Mucha's services in order to announce the latest productions. Mucha also knew some of the actresses and organisers of these events, and found the content inspiring and easy to work with.

Such advertising gives us all an exciting insight into this period, and therefore these artworks serve much more than just an aesthetic purpose. We can see precisely how the middle classes were living their lives at the time, and how different imagery was used to announce and promote desirable products to them. We can also get an understanding about things like disposable income, leisure time and more by examining what types of services were being used back then. This has helped to build Mucha's reputation with today's audience, who find these posters charming and intriguing, taking us back to a simpler, perhaps better time, before the abundance of technology which dominates our world today. For that reason, prints of Mucha's paintings remain particularly popular and items such as Benedictine continue to be amongst the most common choices.