In 1901, one year after Georges de Feure published in Le Figaro Illustré , a series of four illustrations of the seasons, Luchian was commissioned to decorate the Bucharest home of Victor Antonescu. The artist borrowed freely from de Feure’s allegories. He also established his reputation as a promoter of Art Nouveau, a style whose freshness swept across Europe. Luchian’s four decorative panels of the seasons show how quick local artists and high society were to adopt Western trends and consummer behaviours. Allegorical images of the seasons had been available in Bucharest as of about 1895, when colour lithographs and posters were sold together with various fashionable magazines.
Art Nouveau artists often resorted to allegories of the seasons as ameans to portray some of the ‘iconic’ beauties of the day. To answer his client’s aspirations, Luchian chose fashionable attitudes and poses which lent his compositions a chic urban flavour. However, his personal artistic choice soon moved in another direction, as he developed a personal style based primarily on the power of colour. It was this masterful use of colour that turned Luchian into a model for many painters of the new generation.