Nestle's Food for Infants

Alphonse Mucha continues his work with advertisement posters in this piece which promotes Nestle's Food. The target audience would be aspirational mothers who want to give their children the best quality products available, and Nestle employ Mucha's artistic skills in order to build this brand.

Here we find a tall young woman carefully mixing a milk product for her child. She is dressed elegantly in order to build this aspirational image which would help Nestle to sell more of their food items. Mucha built up a solid reputation for creating posters in this way, helping to attract the middle classes towards items such as food, drink, travel and theatre. He found large amounts of work in Paris, which was a city with an enviable record on culture at that time. Posters were an important means with which to communicate with the public, as the use of television or the internet was still many years away. Today, artworks such as this provide a stunning view into the world of historical advertising, capturing a simpler time when physical items would be used to promote different products. In today's world, the artist would have produced these illustrations on a computer before transferring them into a digital format to be published online.

The artist separates the main message into two, placing Nestle's Food across the top of the artwork in a narrow band, with For Infants then placed across the bottom. The artist puts considerable detail into the background here, with a mosaic of tiles that sits behind the female figure. There are also many other flourishes of design which perfectly capture the Art Nouveau approach. The font used is common for this time and oozes a classical elegance. It would have been chosen because it is legible from a good distance but also, stylistically, perfectly suits the theme of this advert. You will also spot the product itself added to the left hand side in order to solidify the impact of this poster.

There are many more exciting artworks to discover from this artist's career, including the likes of Zodiac, Princezna Hyacinta and Medee. He specialised in female portraiture but was adaptable enough to vary these forms across different genres. There were also history paintings as well, particularly in the earlier part of his career when his approach was somewhat more traditional. He managed to put together a consistent approach to his advertising work, even though they would have to match the needs of a number of different commercial entities. Perhaps he held a strong power over the work, particularly as his reputation started to build. Otherwise he may have been forced to submit to the specific needs of each company which may have caused this body of work to diverge in style and content much more.