Advertisement for Job cigarettes.

Advertisement for Job Cigarettes (1896) is one of Mucha's most celebrated commercial designs and a touchstone of Art Nouveau graphic art. The Job cigarette brand — named after the biblical figure of patient suffering, a somewhat ironic name for a cigarette company — commissioned Mucha to produce a series of posters that became enormously successful in France and across Europe. This lithograph print, held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is among the most distinguished holdings of commercial Art Nouveau graphic design in any public collection. Mucha's image of a woman with flowing, sinuously rendered hair wreathed in cigarette smoke became one of the defining images of fin-de-siècle visual culture, transforming a product advertisement into an object of genuine aesthetic contemplation.

Lithograph printing enabled Mucha to achieve his characteristic smooth colour fields and sinuous contour lines without the tonal limitations of other print media. The Job poster deploys his mastery of hair as a decorative element — rendered in flowing, interlocking curves that fill the compositional space with rhythmic energy. The integration of smoke and hair creates the image's central formal invention: two substances of different character united by Mucha's linear treatment.