Lefevre Utile

Lefèvre Utile was a famous French food company who employed Alphonse Mucha several times in order to help promote some of their product lines. These included items such as biscuits, chocolate and champagne which appealed to the French middle classes.

Within this artwork we find a pretty young woman looking directly at us, with beautifully styled hair and flowers decoratively added across her head. Her outfit is elaborate and classically styled, helping to portray just the image that Lefèvre Utile wanted themselves and their products to be associated with. She holds an opaque blue cloth close to her chest, whilst seemingly deep in thought. Behind her is a loosely painted tree, creating the illusion of her being sat outside, perhaps in some local woodland. In the foreground there is a small collection of red-headed flowers that add additional layers to this composition. Mucha then draws a faux-frame himself which accounts for the poster format of this design, where genuine frames could not be used across the many thousands of prints later produced from it.

The artist then inserts the company's name onto the bottom part of the frame design, and adds their motif in the bottom left of the artwork. The colours are bold and the content simple memorable, just as an impactful poster would need to be. If you look closely at the larger image of the poster included at the bottom of this page, you will also see some written notes in the bottom right of the painting, along with some sort of signature. It is impossible to decipher these words without seeing the original artwork and perhaps having someone to translate them from the original language, be it French or Czech.

Mucha was happy to complete a number of illustrative posters for this respected French company, perhaps feeling that he could also boost his own brand by sharing the limelight with such an aspirational firm. Others illustrations that he produced for them during their successful partnership included the likes of Biscuit Champagne Lefevre Utile, Biscuits Lefevre Utile and Biscuits and Chocolate Delcare. He would also work for other companies too, and these tended to be related to middle class pastimes, which was a growing part of French society during the late 19th and early 20th century. These artworks provide historians with an interesting insight into advertising of that era, which was predominantly completed through the print media, with television and internet yet to hit the mainstream.