Portrait of Mucha's Daughter, Jaroslava

Portrait of Mucha's Daughter, Jaroslava (1931) is a late family portrait painted when Mucha was seventy-one and Jaroslava — his daughter, born in 1909 — was in her early twenties. Jaroslava grew up during the years of the Slav Epic's execution, spending much of her childhood and youth in the family's environment of historical research, monumental painting, and nationalist idealism. She would outlive her father by many decades and became an important guardian of his legacy. The Mucha Foundation's holding of the portrait reflects its status as a family document as much as a work of art. As one of Mucha's last portraits of an individual he knew intimately, it belongs to the private strand of his output that reveals the warmer and less declamatory aspects of his artistic personality.

Mucha's late portrait style retains the academic rigour of his training — careful tonal modelling of the face and hands, naturalistic observation of individual character — while settling into a quieter, more intimate register than the public ambitions of the Slav Epic. The palette is warm but restrained. Attention is concentrated on the sitter's face with the directness appropriate to a personal rather than commissioned portrait.