The major artists who created work in this domain included Aubrey Beardsley in Britain, The Czech Alphonse Mucha and Eugène Grasset, Jules Chéret, Georges de Feure and the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Koloman Moser in Vienna, and Will H. Bradley in the United States.

The first appearance of the curving, sinuous forms that came to be called Art Nouveau is traditionally attributed to Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942) in 1883.

In the same year, he began engraving illustrations and posters for the art magazine The Studio, which helped publicize European artists such as Fernand Khnopff in Britain.

The son a family of artisans, he apprenticed with a lithographer and also studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.

His breakthrough came in 1866 when a French perfume and toiletries maker, Eugene Rimmel, commissioned him to make advertising posters for his products.

He helped decorate the famous cabaret Le Chat noir in 1885 and made his first posters for the Fêtes de Paris.

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), born in Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic, trained as a painter in Munich for two years and then moved to Paris in 1887, where he struggled to survive.

His moment came in December 1894, when he was asked, on very short notice, to create a poster for a new play, Gismonda, starring Sarah Bernhardt.

His poster, a full-length portrait of Bernardt in costume against a background of Byzantine mosaic and sinuous lettering, became an immediate classic of Art Nouveau.

The female figure were always highly stylized, and embellished with floral decoration and curling whiplash lines or The backgrounds were two-dimensional, filled with ornament but no depth.

[4] Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923) was another important early Art Nouveau figure, whose work focused more on ordinary people and life in Montmartre, and political causes; besides making posters for cabarets, he illustrated socialist and anarchist publications.

He made a famous poster for a cabaret called Le Chat Noir in 1896, with typical Art Nouveau curved lines and asymmetric print.

He specialized in portraits of women, either portraying them as idealized figures, taken from the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, as in the illustration for the cover of L'Hermitage, or as seducers, as in his poster for the Folies Bergere, depicting the dancer and courtesan Liane de Pougy luring men into a spider's web.

Orazi also made illustrations of Sarah Bernhardt, including a poster of her as the Byzantine Empress Theodora, surrounded by mosaic patterns.

He became highly successful for the discreetly erotic women in his advertising posters, filled with the sinuous lines that were trademark of Art Nouveau.

Another important German graphic artist was Josef Rudolf Witzel (1867–1925), who produced many early covers for Jugend with curving, floral forms which helped shape the style.

The peacock was an early Christian symbol of immortality; it was used by James McNeill Whistler to decorate a room in London, by Louis Comfort Tiffany for a celebrated stained glass window, and by Bradley for The Modern Poster, advertising a book of that name by Scribner's publishers.