Precious Stones and Flowers

Precious Stones and Flowers is a 1900 work by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha

The four sections of the piece each depict a woman juxtaposed with a colour-based pairing of a gem and flower. The work is also often broken up into its four component pieces, but there is a unique appeal to having the set all grouped together.

Although much the artist's work involves heavy use of typography and a certain commercial sensibility, this piece evokes a more traditional aesthetic than that.

The way in which it presents the subject through a quartet of images evokes classical concepts like the four elements, the four bodily humours and even C.S. Lewis' four loves.

Like these similar paradigms, the image represents multiple facets of the same basic concept (in this case, the woman whose likeness appears in all four sections of the work).

The woman in the piece, both backed and foregrounded by the beauty of nature, is transformed into a goddess-like being which befits this interpretation. Rather than being surrounded by commercial objects as she might have been in another of Mucha's works, she seems to inhabit a world that knows no such thing.

As such, the piece exchanges the attractively dated look of its predecessors for a more elevated and timeless one.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this painting is the perfectly executed monochromatic palette of each segment.

In each, the featured colour is presented in a wide range of beautiful tints and shades, but none is so strong as to overwhelm either its own segment or any of the others.

The soft yet rich colours instead work in harmony to show the viewer that balance is a crucial aspect of this piece. Overall, its rainbow hues manage to be pleasant without becoming irritating or distracting; they do not compete with each other, but instead work together to create a surprisingly gentle image.