Booksplendour: Fine, Rare Used Books Online, Brisbane, Australia

BookSplendour is an online bookstore......and a family business, which is currently being operated by three persons and several other highly important creatures. As a registered business we have been online since 2002 . We offer personal service by the proprietors. We will promptly answer your inquiries and, if required, will send you digital images of the books. We normally dispatch all orders on the next working day, and we use a superior packaging material for the books' protection.

We are situated in Pullenvale, a western suburb of Brisbane, the capitol of Queensland, on the eastern coast of Australia. If you have not heard of Australia, this is where you find it.

Customers are welcome to visit us, they however need to make an appointment and come as private visitors. Also, it needs to be understood that as an online bookshop we do not arrange our books by subjects, only by inventory numbers. This makes browsing through our books on the shelves difficult. It is much easier searching or browsing online and e-mailing us. You can also ring us on 07-3202 7547 between 9AM and 7PM, and give us details of the books you are looking for. We can almost instantly confirm the books' availability and describe their condition to you. The books can be ordered immediately over the phone, and they will be promptly dispatched.

The books that we offer for sale are all in our possession. We can get them off the shelf within seconds and give you the information you need. If you decide to purchase any of our books, your order can be processed quickly, as we accept Mastercard, Visa, Bankcard and American Express. Other available methods of payment include PayPal, cheque or money order. However, due to the relatively high fees that most banks charge for converting foreign currencies, cheques and money orders can normally be accepted in the Australian dollars only.

The Eternal Pilgrim's Online Art Gallery

We have added an online art gallery containing landscapes, seascapes and abstract paintings by Voyen Koreis, as well as images of works by some of the artists we like.

Blog - The art we like: Alphonse (Alfons) Mucha (1860 - 1939)

Having had his application to study at the Prague Academy of Arts rejected, the Czech born Mucha journeyed to Vienna, where he attended an evening class in drawing, and later to Munich, where between 1885 - 87 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to Paris in the late 1880s. When in 1890 he held his first one man show in Paris he was able to display well over 400 works. For a while in Paris he shared studio with another of our favourite painters, Paul Gauguine. Though the two artists had a great deal in common (for instance the desire to explore some of the darker corners of occultism by attending spiritualistic s�ances), it very soon became obvious that Mucha�s art was going to develop quite differently to that of his older companion. While Paris was at the grip of Impressionism and the budding Expressionism, Mucha obviously always saw himself more as a designer rather than an innovative artist. That is not to say that he was not original. His originality lies in the way he was able to marry the ornamental design with the figurative painting, creating something that in his time was referred to as �Le Style Mucha�, before it became known as Art Nouveau (Mucha himself did not like the term, insisting that art was eternal and therefore could not be new).

Mucha's art, when he was at the peak of his creative powers around 1900, above all else is an apotheoses of womanhood. While his women are always extremely beautiful and often even voluptuous, one would hesitate to say that the artist saw them as �sex objects�, to use the present-day terminology. While their femininity is always strongly accentuated, there is something about them, perhaps their innocence, that reminds one more of the idealistic Pre-Raphaelite painters rather than Mucha's contemporary, the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, whose portraits, while equally glamorous, are far more sensuous.

There is something else that lies underneath Mucha�s art. Not looking much for inspiration in the works of his contemporaries, nevertheless he could not escape the influence of the occult revival that had hit Paris just before his arrival. It was to inspire not only the visual artists of his and the next generation, but perhaps even more so the people in other fields of art, such as musical composers, architects, etc. Almost everything in Mucha�s art is about cycles, which to him are closely associated with the evolution of the human spirit.

The theatre posters that he designed for Sara Bernhardt for the play Gismonda became a sensation in Paris in December 1894. Virtually overnight, Mucha found himself famous.

In 1900, when the World Fair was held in Paris, Mucha received the prestigious commission to decorate the Austrian pavilion. Mucha stayed in Paris till 1906, when he went for several years to America, where he taught art at New York and Chicago. After 1910 he lived more or less permanently in Prague, but frequently travelled to America.

Mucha was a very versatile artist. He worked on advertisements for various products and on ornamental panels, he had his hand in architectural design, he made a large number of book illustrations, he designed jewellery, he even made some sculptures. From the age of 50 or so, after returning to his homeland, he became much preoccupied with an enormous project he named the Slav Epic, a cycle of monumental paintings illustrating the history of the Slavs, on which he worked intermittently until his death.

Incidentally, the name Mucha (or moucha) in Czech means the fly. A fly on the wall... these pictures certainly could evoke such an image in one's mind...

And one more thing: Mucha's name is nearly always mispronounced. The French are mainly to blame for this, but the English speakers don't fall far behind. Properly pronounced, the "ch" in his name should sound close to how the Scots would pronounce the "ch" in the name of the lake Loch Ness.