Although Mucha is known principally as a graphic artist, his paintings form an important part of his art. Furnished with academic training in Munich and Paris, he was a skilled painter as exemplified by his oil portraits and the historical illustrations produced during the 1880s and 1890s. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 Mucha worked on a complex decorative scheme for the Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion with murals based on a historical subject. From the early 1900s he began to develop a new style combining realism and symbolism to create a visionary world. He pursued the full potential of this style in the twenty monumental canvases of the Slav Epic.