Art Nouveau
paintings & oil reproductions

Art Nouveau paintings: the guide

Art Nouveau, the “new art”, swept through Europe between about 1890 and 1910. Tired of copying old styles, artists and designers looked to plants, flowers and flowing hair for a new language of curving lines, flat colour and ornament. It was everywhere at once: posters on Paris streets, the entrances of the Métro, jewellery, furniture and buildings. In Vienna it took the name Secession, and in painting it gave us Gustav Klimt’s gold, Alphonse Mucha’s goddesses with their halos of hair, and the rhythmic, almost ritual figures of Ferdinand Hodler.

The most famous Art Nouveau paintings

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt (1907 to 1908)

Two lovers dissolving into a field of gold leaf and pattern, the defining image of Vienna around 1900. Belvedere, Vienna. Read the story.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Gustav Klimt (1907)

The Woman in Gold, seized by the Nazis and returned to her family after a famous legal fight. Neue Galerie, New York. Read the story.

Judith I, Gustav Klimt (1901)

The biblical heroine as a Viennese femme fatale, in a gold frame made by Klimt’s brother. Belvedere, Vienna. Read the story.

The Tree of Life, Gustav Klimt (1905 to 1911)

Endless spiralling branches designed for a dining room in Brussels, Art Nouveau ornament at its purest.

Water Serpents I, Gustav Klimt (1904 to 1907)

Water spirits drifting through green and gold, all long hair and flowing line. Belvedere, Vienna. Read the story.

Job, Alphonse Mucha (1896)

A woman with a cloud of curling hair smokes a cigarette, made as an advertisement for a brand of cigarette paper. One of the posters that made Mucha the face of Art Nouveau in Paris.

Salammbô, Alphonse Mucha (1896)

The Carthaginian priestess from Flaubert’s novel, framed by ornament and drifting smoke. Mucha’s decorative style turned literature into design.

Madonna of the Lilies, Alphonse Mucha (1905)

The Virgin as a floating vision among lilies above a young girl in folk costume, painted for a church that was never built.

The Apotheosis of the Slavs, Alphonse Mucha (1926)

The last of the twenty huge canvases of the Slav Epic, Mucha’s life’s work on the history of the Slavic peoples.

Night, Ferdinand Hodler (1889 to 1890)

Sleeping figures on black cloth, and in the middle a man woken by a shrouded figure of death. Banned from an exhibition in Geneva, it made Hodler famous in Paris. Kunstmuseum Bern.

The Dying Valentine Godé-Darel, Ferdinand Hodler (1915)

From the series of paintings Hodler made at the bedside of the woman he loved as she died of cancer, one of the most moving records in modern art.

Breakfast under the Big Birch, Carl Larsson (1896)

The Larsson family eating outdoors at their home in Sundborn, from the pictures of family life that shaped the Scandinavian idea of home. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Repose, John White Alexander (1895)

A woman stretched on a sofa, her white dress curving like a wave. The American painter’s answer to Art Nouveau line. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

What makes a painting Art Nouveau?

• The whiplash line: long, curving outlines borrowed from stems, vines and waves.
• Ornament as subject: gold, mosaic and pattern share the canvas with the figures.
• Flat colour learned from Japanese prints, with figures framed like icons.
• Women and nature: muses, goddesses, flowers and flowing hair, again and again.

Explore the painters on our artist pages for Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha and Ferdinand Hodler. Every Art Nouveau painting in our shop is in the public domain and can be ordered as a hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas, in the size you choose.