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 Bernhardt, the invention of the decorative panel, his spiritual ambitions and Le Pater, the hidden Slavic sorrow in his 1900 Paris Exposition murals, the American trips that connected him with patron Charles Richard Crane, the 16 years spent painting the Slav Epic in egg tempera, and his death in 1939 weeks after Gestapo interrogation.

• Why the Gismonda poster’s muted pastels and Byzantine halo stopped Parisians in the street
• How his faith made him see champagne posters as a visual trick rather than art
• Why he chose egg tempera for canvases meant to last a thousand years
• Why critics shrugged at the Slav Epic when it was completed in 1928
• How the rolled-up epic went from 25 years in storage to a permanent home in Prague