The Nabis ('prophets' in Hebrew) were a group of French Post-Impressionist painters, active in Paris from 1888 to around 1900, who built on Paul Gauguin's flat colour and symbolic tendencies. They produced easel paintings, theatre sets, stained glass, posters and illustrated books, treating the decorative and the fine arts as equal in value. The core members met as students at the Académie Julian in 1888.

When did the Nabis start?

The group coalesced in October 1888 when Paul Sérusier returned from a visit to Gauguin in Pont-Aven carrying a tiny experimental landscape known as The Talisman. He showed the painting to his friends Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Paul Ranson at the Académie Julian. They took the Hebrew name Nabis at Henri Cazalis's suggestion, treating themselves as prophets of a new art.

Who are the most famous Nabi artists?

Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard are the best known, and went on to long independent careers after the group dissolved. Maurice Denis was the movement's chief theorist, publishing the famous formulation in 1890 that a painting is 'essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order'. Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Félix Vallotton and the Swiss-born Ker-Xavier Roussel completed the core group, with the sculptor Aristide Maillol as an associate member.

What defines the Nabi style?

Nabi paintings use flat patterned colour, strong decorative outlines, asymmetric compositions often cropped like Japanese prints, and subject matter drawn from intimate Parisian domestic life (the intimistes, including Bonnard and Vuillard) or from symbolist religious themes (Denis, Sérusier). The movement's engagement with applied art, through posters for the Revue Blanche and programmes for Lugné-Poe's theatre, was unusually central to their practice.

What is the difference between the Nabis and Post-Impressionism?

Post-Impressionism is the broad umbrella for everything that came after Impressionism between 1886 and 1905, including Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat. The Nabis are a specific group within that period who took Gauguin's example as a starting point and developed a distinctive decorative idiom. Where Post-Impressionism names a historical phase, 'Nabis' names a defined membership with shared studio years and published manifestos.

Why were the Nabis important?

The Nabis established the principle that painting is first a decorative arrangement of colour on a flat surface, and only secondarily a representation of the world. Denis's 1890 formulation directly anticipates twentieth-century modernism. Bonnard and Vuillard's later careers turned Nabi intimism into a sustained late-Impressionist tradition that ran into the 1940s, providing a continuous bridge between nineteenth-century painting and post-war French art.

Where can I see the best Nabi paintings?

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds the canonical Nabi collection, including Sérusier's Talisman and major paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper has a specific Breton focus. The Musée Bonnard at Le Cannet in the South of France preserves the late Bonnard. The Kunsthaus Zurich holds Vallotton. Tate and the National Gallery in London have supplementary Bonnard and Vuillard holdings.

L'église rose - Tilloloy by Maurice Denis

Nabis

8 artists · 1888–1900

The Nabis^[4] were a small group of French painters active from about 1888 to 1900 who took their name from the Hebrew word for "prophets." Formed around Paul Serusier's encounter with Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, the group rejected academic perspective and naturalistic colour in favour of flat, decorative surfaces and bold hue. Maurice Denis supplied the theoretical framework, declaring that a painting is first of all a flat surface covered with colours in a certain order. Pierre Bonnard [7] and Edouard Vuillard [6] pursued a quieter branch called Intimism, finding their subjects in domestic interiors, patterned wallpaper and candlelit rooms. Felix Vallotton brought a graphic sharpness influenced by Japanese woodcuts. The Nabis worked across painting, printmaking, poster design, theatre sets and decorative screens, refusing to separate fine art from applied craft. Their insistence on the picture plane's flatness and on colour as an independent expressive force helped clear the ground for Fauvism and abstraction in the century that followed.

Key Ideas

The Flat Surface

Denis's 1890 declaration that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order became the group's guiding idea. The Nabis rejected the Renaissance window: no fictive depth, no atmospheric recession. Paint sat on the surface as pattern. This flattening of space drew on Japanese prints and Gauguin's Synthetism, and it pointed toward the abstract experiments of the twentieth century.
Art Without Borders

The Nabis refused to rank easel painting above decoration. They designed theatre sets for the Symbolist stage, created lithographic posters, painted folding screens and produced stained glass. Bonnard's poster for France-Champagne (1891) is as considered as any of his oil paintings. This attitude challenged the academic hierarchy that placed history painting at the top and decorative work at the bottom.
Intimism

Bonnard and Vuillard formed a sub-group sometimes called the Intimists. They painted domestic interiors: a woman sewing, a lamp on a table, a child in a garden. Vuillard's compositions dissolve figures into wallpaper patterns so that the human presence and the room become one continuous surface. The mood is quiet, private, attentive to small pleasures. Intimism proposed that the ordinary held as much pictorial interest as mythology or landscape.
Gauguin's Catalyst

The movement began when Serusier painted a small landscape on a cigar-box lid under Gauguin's direction at Pont-Aven in 1888. Gauguin told him to use pure colour straight from the tube and to paint what he felt, not what he saw. The result, later called The Talisman, was a nearly abstract patch of greens, blues and oranges. Serusier brought it back to Paris and the group crystallised around its example.

Key Artists

Pierre Bonnard

1867–1947 · French

Edouard Vuillard

1868–1940 · French

Paul Sérusier

1864–1927 · French

Maurice Denis

1870–1943 · French

Félix Vallotton

1865–1925 · Swiss

Explore adjacent traditions and influences.

Symbolism

1880–1910

Post-Impressionism

1880–1910

Art Nouveau

1890–1910

Progression of Art

Landmark works that shaped the movement.

The Talisman

Paul Serusier · 1888 · Oil on wood panel

Serusier painted this small landscape on the lid of a cigar box at Pont-Aven, following Gauguin's instruction to use pure, unblended colour. Trees, water and a footpath dissolve into flat patches of green, orange, blue and vermilion. The panel is almost abstract: forms are suggested rather than described. Serusier brought it back to Paris and showed it to his fellow students at the Academie Julian, who recognised it as a manifesto in miniature. They called it The Talisman and formed the Nabis around its principles. The painting now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay as one of the catalysts of modern French art.

The Muses

Maurice Denis · 1893 · Oil on canvas

Denis arranged nine female figures among trees in a shallow, frieze-like composition. Depth is suppressed: the background forest reads as a flat pattern of verticals and greens. The women wear simplified robes in muted tones. Denis intended the painting as a decorative panel, and its horizontal format suits a wall above a doorway or mantelpiece. The work embodies his theory that a picture should function as an ordered arrangement of colour and form before it tells a story. It also reflects his Catholic Symbolism, presenting the muses as meditative, almost devotional figures.

The Ball

Felix Vallotton · 1899 · Oil on board

A red ball sits on a sunlit patch of grass in a park. A small child runs toward it while an adult figure stands in shadow at the far edge. Vallotton flattened the perspective so that the lawn tilts upward and the figures appear as silhouettes against contrasting zones of light and dark. The composition is startlingly modern: the off-centre ball, the empty expanse of green, the tension between the running child and the distant watcher. Vallotton's graphic sensibility, sharpened by years of woodcut printing, gives the scene a clarity that feels closer to cinema than to nineteenth-century landscape painting.

Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist

Edouard Vuillard · 1893 · Oil on canvas

Vuillard's mother and sister occupy a narrow domestic interior filled with patterned fabrics. The wallpaper, the dresses and the upholstery merge into a single decorative surface. Figures are defined not by drawn outlines but by the meeting of different patterns. Vuillard worked from memory rather than life, compressing observed detail into flat, interlocking colour fields. The painting captures the quiet rhythm of domestic routine and demonstrates Intimism at its most characteristic: private, attentive, and compositionally daring in its refusal to separate figure from ground.

Woman in a Striped Dress

Edouard Vuillard · 1895 · Oil on canvas

A woman stands in a room where every surface carries pattern: striped dress, floral wallpaper, checkered floor. Vuillard treats each element with equal emphasis so that the figure nearly disappears into her surroundings. The palette is warm, muted, built from browns, ochres and dusty pinks. This dissolution of the figure into the decorative field was Vuillard's signature contribution. It anticipated later experiments in surface and flatness while remaining grounded in the specific textures of a Parisian apartment.

Dining Room in the Country

Pierre Bonnard · 1913 · Oil on canvas

Bonnard painted this scene from his house at Vernonnet, looking through an open door to the garden beyond. The interior walls flash with warm pinks and yellows. A woman sits at a table laden with fruit, and a small dog lingers beneath. Bonnard collapsed foreground and background by matching the warmth of the interior colour to the green and gold of the garden, so that inside and outside flow into one continuous surface. Though painted after the Nabis had formally disbanded, the picture carries forward the group's principles: flattened space, saturated colour, and a domestic subject treated with the seriousness of a mural.

Origins

The Pont-Aven Encounter

In the autumn of 1888 Paul Serusier travelled to Brittany and met Paul Gauguin at the artists' colony in Pont-Aven. Gauguin had broken with Impressionism and was painting in flat, simplified forms with strong outline and non-naturalistic colour. Under his guidance Serusier painted a tiny landscape that abandoned observation for feeling. He returned to Paris with the panel and showed it to his classmates at the Academie Julian. The response was immediate. Denis, Bonnard, Vuillard, Ranson and Ibels formed a group to pursue the implications of Gauguin's method.

The Academie Julian Circle

The Academie Julian was a private art school popular with foreign and French students who could not enter the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It offered a less rigid curriculum and a more open atmosphere. The young painters who would become the Nabis met there in the late 1880s and shared an appetite for new ideas. They read Symbolist poetry, attended Mallarme's Tuesday gatherings and debated the boundary between fine art and decoration. The studio provided both the social network and the intellectual environment from which the group emerged.

Naming the Prophets

The group adopted the name Nabis, meaning prophets in Hebrew, at the suggestion of the poet Auguste Cazalis. The name reflected their sense of mission: they saw themselves as bearers of a new artistic truth derived from Gauguin. Meetings took place at Paul Ranson's studio, which they called The Temple. The quasi-religious language was partly serious and partly playful. By the mid-1890s the group had begun to drift apart as individual careers diverged, though Bonnard and Vuillard continued to develop the principles they had absorbed during the Nabis years.

In Their Words

“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Maurice Denis, Definition du Neo-Traditionnisme, Art et Critique (1890)

“A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”

Emile Zola, Mon Salon (1866), adopted by the Nabis as a guiding principle

“I do not paint a portrait. I paint a picture.”

Pierre Bonnard, Cited in Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard: Shimmering Colour (2000)

All Nabis Artists

6 artists.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Nabis?
The Nabis^[4] ('prophets' in Hebrew) were a group of French Post-Impressionist painters, active in Paris from 1888 to around 1900, who built on Paul Gauguin's flat colour and symbolic tendencies. They produced easel paintings, theatre sets, stained glass, posters and illustrated books, treating the decorative and the fine arts as equal in value. The core members met as students at the Académie Julian in 1888.
When did the Nabis start?
The group coalesced in October 1888 when Paul Sérusier returned from a visit to Gauguin in Pont-Aven carrying a tiny experimental landscape known as The Talisman. He showed the painting to his friends Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard^[7], Édouard Vuillard and Paul Ranson at the Académie Julian. They took the Hebrew name Nabis^[4] at Henri Cazalis's suggestion, treating themselves as prophets of a new art.
Who are the most famous Nabi artists?
Pierre Bonnard^[7] and Édouard Vuillard are the best known, and went on to long independent careers after the group dissolved. Maurice Denis was the movement's chief theorist, publishing the famous formulation in 1890 that a painting is 'essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order'. Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Félix Vallotton and the Swiss-born Ker-Xavier Roussel completed the core group, with the sculptor Aristide Maillol as an associate member.
What defines the Nabi style?
Nabi paintings use flat patterned colour, strong decorative outlines, asymmetric compositions often cropped like Japanese prints, and subject matter drawn from intimate Parisian domestic life (the intimistes, including Bonnard and Vuillard) or from symbolist religious themes (Denis, Sérusier). The movement's engagement with applied art, through posters for the Revue Blanche and programmes for Lugné-Poe's theatre, was unusually central to their practice.
What is the difference between the Nabis and Post-Impressionism?
Post-Impressionism is the broad umbrella for everything that came after Impressionism between 1886 and 1905, including Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat. The Nabis^[4] are a specific group within that period who took Gauguin's example as a starting point and developed a distinctive decorative idiom. Where Post-Impressionism names a historical phase, 'Nabis' names a defined membership with shared studio years and published manifestos.
Why were the Nabis important?
The Nabis^[4] established the principle that painting is first a decorative arrangement of colour on a flat surface, and only secondarily a representation of the world. Denis's 1890 formulation directly anticipates twentieth-century modernism. Bonnard and Vuillard's later careers turned Nabi intimism into a sustained late-Impressionist tradition that ran into the 1940s, providing a continuous bridge between nineteenth-century painting and post-war French art.
Where can I see the best Nabi paintings?
The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds the canonical Nabi collection, including Sérusier's Talisman and major paintings by Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quimper has a specific Breton focus. The Musée Bonnard at Le Cannet in the South of France preserves the late Bonnard. The Kunsthaus Zurich holds Vallotton. Tate and the National Gallery in London have supplementary Bonnard and Vuillard holdings.

Sources

Nabis editorial draws on the following published scholarship.

[1] book Timothy Hyman, Bonnard, 1998 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis, technique.
[2] book Guy Cogeval, Vuillard, 2003 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[3] book Patricia Eckert Boyer, The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 1988 Used for: exhibition history, influences, stylistic analysis.
[4] wikipedia Wikipedia: Nabis Used for: biography.
[5] book Nathalia Brodskaya, Post-Impressionism Used for: biography.
[6] wikipedia Wikipedia: Edouard Vuillard Used for: biography.
[7] wikipedia Wikipedia: Pierre Bonnard Used for: biography.

Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-06-30. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.

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Nabis

Key Ideas

The Flat Surface

Art Without Borders

Intimism

Gauguin's Catalyst