Alphonse Mucha defined the look of 1890s Paris with swirling floral posters of beautiful women, yet he rejected the Art Nouveau label and considered his true masterpiece to be 20 giant canvases on the history of the Slavic people. This episode follows his life from poverty in Moravia, where a merchant gave him paper his family could not afford and singing in a cathedral choir paid for school, through rejection by the Prague academy, theatrical scenery painting in Vienna, and the theater fire that left him lettering tombstones in a small town.

We trace the chance patronage of a local count that sent him to Munich and Paris, the desperate holiday week in December 1894 when Sarah Bernhardt needed a poster for Gismonda and Mucha was the only artist in the shop, and the frenzy that followed. The conversation covers his six-year contract with Ber ...