In the last few years we have worked on five large scale Alfonse Mucha posters, most of them of "the most famous actress the world has ever known" Sarah Bernhardt. I can't resist a short (I promise I'll keep it short) art history lesson: Alfonse Mucha was a Czech artist working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His breakthrough as an artist actually came about because of an 1894 poster design for Sarah Bernhardt (a poster known as Gismonda). The Gismonda poster established Mucha as the preeminent French Art Nouveau artist. The poster showcased in this series of blog posts is a beautiful example of Mucha's arabesque style of design, the print maker's art and the lovely Sarah Bernhardt. The piece arrived in our shop in what we have jokingly taken to calling an upright coffin. It was previously linen backed and while that backing was aged it was doing its job of holding this quickly deteriorating poster together. A thin sheet of plexi-glass makes