Alphonse Mucha’s Zodiac, also called Zodiaque, began as a calendar design in Paris. By 1924, the woman at its center had appeared on a tin of American chocolates. The two objects make an unusually good pair to look at. The calendar uses a ring of zodiac signs to give the portrait a year’s worth of time. The chocolate tin keeps the profile and leaves out the signs. The change shows how much of an image can disappear while the figure still carries the design.
Why an 1896 design has a 1897 calendar
The Mucha Foundation identifies Zodiac as the first design Mucha made under his contract with the Paris printer F. Champenois. The printer wanted a company calendar for 1897. Mucha created the image in 1896, and the editor Léon Deschamps secured distribution rights. The image then appeared on the calendar La Plume issued for 1897. The two dates name stages in the same story. One marks the making of the design and the other the year a reader could look up on the sheet.
There is a small record of what La Plume offered those readers in an advertisement preserved by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The magazine announced a new issue on the first and fifteenth of each month, and its notice for the Salon des Cent at 31 rue Bonaparte offered free gallery admission to subscribers. A reader could encounter the magazine as a periodical, visit an exhibition under its name, and keep its calendar on the wall. The Mucha Foundation records that six issues were devoted to Mucha in the year of his 1897 solo exhibition at the Salon des Cent. One August cover placed a large feather and the wings of Pegasus inside another field of stars.
How to read the ring of zodiac signs
Start with the face, then follow the arc behind the headdress. The twelve signs of the zodiac turn the circle into a sequence of small images. The picture offers two ways to keep track of a year. The signs go around a ring, while the dates in a calendar grid run across rows and columns. The portrait draws the eye into the design. The symbols and dates give it somewhere to go afterward. Even when the calendar is too small to read, that ring of compartments still gives the image its structure.
The Mucha Foundation identifies at least nine variants. Its text-free decorative panel measures 65.7 by 48.2 centimeters. The Art Institute of Chicago’s Zodiaque (La Plume) is cataloged as an 1896–97 color lithograph made from several stones on tan wove paper, measuring 63 by 47 centimeters. Those records give two concrete objects to compare. When looking at another Zodiac image, begin with the upper and lower edges. Publisher lettering and a calendar grid can tell you more about the function of that version than the portrait alone.
How Zodiaque ended up on a Whitman’s chocolate tin
Almost three decades later, Mucha’s portrait surfaced in an advertisement for Whitman’s Salmagundi Chocolates. In the copy preserved by the Library of Congress, a tray of chocolates sits beside a gold-colored tin that carries the profile. The library notes that the packaging leaves out the zodiac signs. Its record dates the registration of the American advertising design to August 5, 1924. That date makes the ad a separate moment in the life of the image, long after the 1897 calendar had served its practical purpose.
The reproduction on the tin lets you test what makes the figure recognizable. The sweep of the hair, the profile and the outline of the headdress still work at packaging scale. The calendar had invited a reader to return to the sheet for information through the year. In the advertisement the tin sits beside the opened chocolates, where the picture helps distinguish the package. Setting the two uses side by side makes it easier to see what the printed image gained from the ring of signs and what it could carry across the Atlantic without it.
See the La Plume lettering and calendar panel
The Zodiaque – La Plume poster reproduction includes the magazine name above the figure and a historical calendar panel below. The product gallery shows those elements at the edges of the print. For more about how Mucha made ornament serve a different job in theater and advertising, read the comparison of Gismonda, JOB and Zodiaque or explore the Alphonse Mucha poster collection.
Sources and further reading
- Mucha Foundation, Zodiac and the text-free decorative panel
- Musée du Luxembourg, exhibition guide on the Champenois calendar
- Mucha Foundation, August 1897 La Plume cover and Salon des Cent
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, period La Plume and Salon des Cent advertisements
- Art Institute of Chicago, Zodiaque (La Plume), collection record
- Library of Congress, 1924 Whitman’s Salmagundi Chocolates advertisement
- Library of Congress, curatorial notes on the Zodiaque adaptation