Mucha’s Heart by Louise Waddington

On New Year's Eve 1894, a relatively unknown illustrator sitting in a Paris print shop received a phone call that would change his life. The legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt needed a poster - urgently - for her new play.

Every other artist in the city was unavailable or celebrating. Alphonse Mucha picked up the job.

The poster for Gismonda caused a sensation proving so popular with Parisians that they were tearing down copies from the walls to keep them. Sarah Bernhardt was so impressed with his work she gave Mucha a six-year contract on the spot. And Art Nouveau - already stirring in the studios and salons of the Belle Epoque - found its defining visual voice.

What made Mucha's style so instantly recognisable was the halo. That luminous circular frame surrounding his central figure, woven through with flowers, geometric ornament, and Byzantine detail - at once sacred and sensuous, architectural and organic. His women didn't just inhabit their posters; they were enshrined in them.

Louise Waddington, an Australian embroiderer of considerable skill, has done something quietly brilliant with her latest design Mucha's Heart in Inspirations magazine issue #130.

She has taken that signature compositional device - the circle, the disc, the decorative frame, the central motif cradled within - and translated it beautifully into thread.

Sixteen individually couched goldwork spirals ring a blush-pink silk centre. Curved gold lines arc between them. Four ornate corners anchor the whole composition with scattered French knot flowers and detached chain foliage.

And at the heart of it all - quite literally - a cluster of dimensional stumpwork flowers in salmon, apricot, and baby pink tumble over raised leaves in deep, graduated greens, their stamens catching the light in tiny beads of gold.

Mucha died in 1939, just months after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia - a country he had spent his final decades celebrating in his monumental painting cycle, The Slav Epic. He never quite shook the reputation of being a decorator rather than a serious artist. History has been kinder to him than his critics were.

We think he'd have approved of this.

We also very much approve of this and think that Louise has done a stunning job - and that Art Nouveau has never looked more beautiful in thread.

If you love this design as much as we do, you can bring it to life with a Ready-to-Stitch kit, now available using the link below.