Alphonse Mucha

This is an advert for cigarette papers, printed in huge runs and pasted up around town. Supposedly people kept peeling the posters off walls to keep them, so the company reissued it in smaller sizes for collectors. He reportedly wanted to be remembered for a giant history cycle he spent years on instead of jobs like this one.

The story goes that this was a rush job over the New Year holiday, when the printer had nobody else free and needed something for the hoardings by the following week. The actress it advertises liked it enough to tie him to a contract for years afterwards, and people supposedly peeled the things off walls overnight to keep them.

This came out of a job rather than out of nowhere — according to Wikipedia the actress hired him to design costumes and sets for a huge open-air Joan of Arc she was staging, and the panel came along with that work.