Top 100 - Nabis
Nabis: 100 famous paintings where color becomes decor
Sérusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Vallotton and their companions transform landscapes, interiors and modern scenes into living surfaces.
In the late 1880s, the Nabis looked at Gauguin, Japanese prints and decorative painting to escape naturalism. These hundred works follow their adventure from The Talisman to the great interiors of Bonnard and Vuillard.
The word nabi means prophet in Hebrew. The group does not, however, announce a single way: Sérusier built by flat areas, Denis unites faith and decor, Bonnard observes modern life, Vuillard paints intimacy, Vallotton cools human relationships and Ranson populates the ornament with symbols.
One hundred paintings that made the surface deeper
The Nabi group is formed around young artists marked by Gauguin, Pont-Aven, synthetism, Japanese prints and symbolism. Their name comes from the Hebrew nabi, prophet, which is ambitious for painters who are often very busy through tablecloths, rooms, gardens and decorative panels. But the ambition is real: to release color, simplify shapes, assert the surface of the painting and give the decor poetic power.
The Nabis do not paint a window open to the world: they remind us that the painting is first and foremost a surface covered in colors. The wall understands immediately; perspective, a little less.Switch to images
Works in pictures
Sérusier, Gauguin, Vallotton, Bonnard, Vuillard and Denis opened with the paintings that gave the movement its most lasting images.
#001
The Talisman
Painted in 1888 in Bois d'Amour under the advice of Gauguin, this small landscape became the talisman of the future Nabi group. Sérusier replaces the observed colors with large, bold flat areas; a cigar box lid is enough to open a new path.
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#002
Vision after the sermon
Breton women see Jacob struggling with the angel, an episode separated from the real world by the diagonal trunk of an apple tree. Gauguin flattens the space and places the red on the ground without asking permission from the landscape; the religious vision becomes a mental construction.
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#003
The Balloon
A child runs after a red balloon in a garden seen from above, while two tiny adults cross the driveway. Vallotton organizes the scene like a Japanese print: sharp flat areas, abrupt perspective and discreet suspense around a perfectly ordinary game.
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#004
Women in the garden: woman with the pilgrim
Bonnard designed Women in the Garden as four decorative panels before separating them. The pilgrim's wife is cut out from vegetation treated in continuous patterns; the character no longer dominates the garden, he agrees to become one of its ornaments.
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#005
In bed
A figure almost entirely buried under the covers appears in a room reduced to a few colored bands. Vuillard transforms the bed into an intimate landscape; the tiny face is enough to make present a person that the decor seemed about to absorb.
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#006
The Muses
Commissioned for the house of musician Henry Lerolle, this panel shows young women among chestnut trees. Denis takes up the ancient idea of the Muses but dresses them like his contemporaries; the sacred wood now resembles a carefully rhythmic Parisian walk.
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#007
The White and the Black
A lying white woman turns her back on a black servant sitting at the edge of the bed. Vallotton constructs a deliberately cold image, whose contrast of skin, posture and gaze refuses any comfortable reading; the silence between the two figures weighs more than the decor.
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#008
Catholic mystery
Denis transposes a religious mystery into a Breton garden where simplified figures almost resemble signs. Faith does not come through realistic illusion, but through lines, colors and rhythm; the painting becomes a sort of windowless stained glass window.
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#009
The White Cat
Bonnard's white cat stretches its back, shortens its legs and advances with frankly unanatomical confidence. The artist prefers the expressive silhouette to zoological correction; the result captures this feline approach made of prudence and superiority better than a scholarly study.
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#010
The Witch with the Black Cat
A red-haired woman, a black cat and a plant decoration compose an image where worry slips behind the ornament. Ranson mixes symbolism, arabesque and taste for Japonism; the witch does not need any cauldron, her gaze and her companion have already taken the night shift.
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#011
The Yellow Sea
In Camaret, Lacombe transforms the rocks and the sea into yellow, green and brown masses separated by powerful contours. The Breton coast ceases to be a geographical survey; it becomes a primitive force, almost sculpted, where the wave appears cut in color.
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#012
Seasons of Life
Roussel brings together several ages of existence in a decorative frieze where the figures respond to each other like the seasons. The allegory abandons academic solemnity for a supple and familiar landscape; all of life passes, but she has taken care to coordinate her colors.
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#013
The Striped Corse
A woman in a striped bodice blends into an interior saturated with patterns. Vuillard deliberately blurs the line between clothing, wallpaper and furniture; it takes a moment to find the figure, then another to understand that the piece tells as much as it does.
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#014
April
Denis represents spring in the guise of young women walking in a clear and rhythmic nature. April does not describe a specific day: it condenses the promise of renewal into simple gestures, light dresses and trees that seem to participate in the procession.
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#015
The Yellow Christ
Gauguin paints Christ crucified with the yellow of the Breton fields and places peasant women in local costume at his feet. The biblical story thus enters contemporary Brittany; the sacred no longer comes from a distant history, but from a color impossible to ignore.
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#016
Avenue de Clichy, five o'clock in the evening
Anquetin shows Avenue de Clichy at dusk under an artificial light which cuts through the silhouettes. The dark contours and flat areas, close to partitionism, give Paris the appearance of a modern stained glass window; the urban night finds its colors even before triumphant electricity.
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#017
The poor fisherman
A widowed father remains motionless at the edge of a pond with his children, in an almost empty landscape. Puvis de Chavannes reduces the anecdote to achieve monumental sadness; the poor fisherman does nothing spectacular, and it is precisely this silence that is overwhelming.
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#018
The Woman with the Umbrella
Maillol paints a life-size woman sheltered under an umbrella, in a space where the silhouette and the decorative background respond to each other. Before becoming a sculptor, he already sought the stability of volumes; the figure appears calm, solid and perfectly installed in its own color.
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#019
Lunch
Vuillard observes a meal without making it a social scene. The guests, the table and the walls mingle in muffled light; lunch becomes a study of proximity, made up of shared presences and those silences that long family habits know well.
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#020
The rowing dress
The flowery dress occupies almost as much of the canvas as the woman who wears it. Vuillard makes clothing an interior landscape and the model a discreet appearance; in this Nabi universe, identity is not opposed to decor, it negotiates with it motif after motif.
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#021
The Omnibus
Bonnard captures a Parisian omnibus as a moving scene of modern life. The vehicle, passengers and street flatten in a composition close to the poster; the city does not pose, it passes, and the painter must set off.
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#022
The bathrobe
The Bathrobe belongs to the decorative ensemble of Women in the Garden. Bonnard stretches the vertical silhouette and treats the dress as an autonomous surface; contemporary fashion becomes the pretext for a painting where fabric, body and vegetation speak the same language.
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#023
Madame Vuillard sewing
Madame Vuillard sews in a familiar interior, a daily activity which was also that of the family sewing workshop. Her son paints less of an official portrait than a silent world of work; the needle is small, but the whole room seems organized around it.
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#024
The lie
A man and a woman hug each other in a living room whose half-open door adds an invisible witness. Vallotton portrays intimacy as an ambiguous negotiation; the title affirms the lie, but leaves it to the spectator, quite uncomfortable, to identify who is deceiving whom.
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#025
Woman seated
Before his large sculpted nudes, Maillol painted this seated woman with an economy of gestures and massive construction. The body tells no anecdote; it simply occupies the space with a stability which already announces the sculpture, as if it were patiently waiting to become volume.
See the painting →Fabrics, tables, silhouettes and foliage show how everyday life becomes a composition of rhythms, patterns and silences.
#026
Madeleine at Bois d’Amour
Madeleine Bernard, sister of the painter, appears alone in the Bois d'Amour in Pont-Aven. The firm contours and simplified surfaces distance the portrait from impressionism; the young woman seems less settled in a landscape than in a state of thought.
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#027
Young Girls by the sea
Three young women stand by a calm sea in timeless attitudes. Puvis de Chavannes removes almost every story to build a slow harmony; the coast becomes the setting for an ideal humanity, silent and slightly foreign to the calendar.
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#028
Beach in Heist
Lemmen builds the Belgian beach with small, regular touches that make the sand, sea and silhouettes vibrate. Neo-impressionism meets here the Nabi taste for decorative surfaces; the seaside day gains a mosaic rigor without losing its sea air.
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#029
Lunch
Bonnard painted the lunch table well after the strictly Nabi era, but retained his taste for unstable framing and interlocking colors. Familiar objects, figures and light make up a domestic memory where the meal already seems to become a memory.
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#030
Interior Mother and Sister of the Artist
Vuillard depicts her mother and sister in an interior where the dark figure, checkered dress and wallpaper collide. Family tension remains silent, but space makes it visible; no piece of furniture is neutral when eyes avoid meeting.
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#031
The Bath in the summer evening
Vallotton gathers a crowd of bathers in a park, seen with an almost ironic distance. Flat bodies and isolated groups transform summer leisure into strange social theater; everyone relaxes, but no one seems to have received the same instructions.
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#032
The Bretons with umbrellas
Bernard lines up the Breton headdresses and parasols in large flat areas surrounded by darkness. The outdoor scene refuses impressionist depth; customs, silhouettes and landscape become the elements of a synthetic image, thought of as a memory rather than as a fleeting moment.
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#033
Hello Mr. Gauguin
Gauguin represents himself meeting a Breton woman near a barrier, as if his arrival at Pouldu became a legendary episode. The title diverts Courbet with humor; the artist constructs his own character, a traveler recognized by the country that he nevertheless comes to reinvent.
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#034
At the Moulin-Rouge
At the Moulin-Rouge, Toulouse-Lautrec brings together dancers, regulars and friends under a greenish light which makes the night almost toxic. The composition cuts the figures like a snapshot and reserves a disturbing apparition for the face in the foreground; the Parisian party retains its dark circles.
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#035
The Cyclops
Redon shows a Cyclops leaning over Galatea's sleeping body. The monster appears less threatening than shy, almost embarrassed by its own eye; mythology becomes a colorful dream where desire observes from afar what it dares not approach.
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#036
Naked in the bath
The body in the bathtub, the walls and the reflections blend into a luminous surface. Bonnard paints Marthe from memory, well after the observed scene; the bath ceases to be a simple interior to become a liquid, intimate and almost borderless world.
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#037
Maternity
Denis transforms motherhood into a sacred scene of everyday life. The mother and child stand out in a calm composition, structured by curves and flat areas; the religious theme and family life come together without the need for particularly demonstrative halos.
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#038
The visit
A social visit brings together several characters in a closed interior, but the looks and postures suggest more unease than conversation. Vallotton uses furniture as psychological barriers; the politeness is impeccable, the atmosphere much less well-mannered.
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#039
The Harvest
Bernard paints the harvest with simplified figures that bend to the rhythm of the fields. Rural work is not described gesture by gesture; it becomes a construction of colors and silhouettes, heir to Pont-Aven and attentive to collective dignity.
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#040
Landscape of Martinique
During his stay in Martinique with Gauguin, Charles Laval discovered a light and vegetation that changed his palette. The tropical landscape is not treated as a postcard; its colorful masses announce the synthetic research which will soon develop in Brittany.
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#041
Laïta Washers
On the banks of the Laïta, Sérusier transforms the gesture of the washers into a decorative rhythm. The bodies, the linen and the bank are ordered in large, simple shapes; Breton life becomes a monumental motif, far from the picturesque little report.
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#042
Lovewood Landscape
This landscape returns to the very place where the Talisman was painted under the leadership of Gauguin. Sérusier treats trees, water and paths as autonomous surfaces; the Bois d’Amour becomes less of a site than a laboratory of color.
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#043
Portrait of Paul Ranson in nabi costume
Sérusier represents his friend Paul Ranson dressed in the ceremonial costume of the Nabis, a group which readily gave itself nicknames and rituals. The portrait mixes fraternal humor and symbolist solemnity; an avant-garde can discuss painting while taking its wardrobe very seriously.
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#044
Woman standing next to a railing with a poodle
Ranson places an elegant woman and her poodle near a balustrade, in a composition where the curves of the body, the dog and the decor respond to each other. The worldly subject becomes an arabesque; even the animal seems to have studied the decorative principles of the group.
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#045
Privacy
Painted at the beginning of the Nabi period, Intimacy shows a woman reading or writing in a close interior. Bonnard simplifies shapes and compresses space; the private scene becomes a dense surface where calm is built with very little distance.
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#046
The letter
A woman holds a letter in a room whose motifs attract almost as much as her gesture. Bonnard leaves the content of the message off-camera and paints the moment after or before reading; the secret lies in the posture, not in an enlarged envelope for the curious.
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#047
The checkered bodice
The woman's checkered bodice dialogues with the background, furniture and other surfaces. Bonnard makes clothing the frame of the image; the model remains present, but the painting allows itself to think in squares before thinking in depth.
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#048
Nanny Walk, Frieze of the Fiacres
Designed as a screen, this panorama shows nurses, children, cabs and dogs in a Parisian street. Bonnard borrows their frieze and cut-out silhouettes from Japanese prints; the modern promenade becomes decoration without losing its delicious disorder.
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#049
Octagonal self-portrait
Vuillard adapts his face to a small octagonal panel, a format which transforms the self-portrait into a decorative object. The direct gaze, however, resists the elegance of the support; behind the patterns and geometry, the young painter asserts an attentive and slightly suspicious presence.
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#050
The Green Interior
In this interior dominated by green, Vuillard dissolves the figure among walls, fabrics and furniture. Color does not only describe the room: it becomes its mental atmosphere, enveloping the inhabitant in a decor that seems to know their habits better than us.
See the painting →Brittany, symbolism and synthetism move color away from imitation to entrust it with memory, faith and emotion.
#051
The half-open door
A half-open door cuts out the interior and reveals a partial presence. Vuillard makes the threshold the real subject: seeing without entering, understanding without knowing everything. Domestic life thus retains a reserve that painting respects, while still looking through the opening.
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#052
Madame Vuillard's sewing workshop
Madame Vuillard's sewing workshop was one of her son's most constant visual laboratories. Fabrics, workers, tables and lamps merge there; women's work becomes an architecture of patterns, concentration and repeated gestures.
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#053
The Orange Christ
Denis paints an orange Christ who stands out as an ardent sign rather than a naturalistic body. Color carries spiritual experience; the religious story rediscovers the frontal simplicity of a popular image, but with all the decorative consciousness of the Nabis.
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#054
Tribute to Cézanne
Around a still life by Cézanne, Denis brought together Redon, Vuillard, Bonnard, Roussel, Sérusier and their friends in 1900. This tribute is also a generational portrait: the avant-garde recognizes itself as a master and takes, for once, the time to pose together.
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#055
The Communicators
Young girls advance towards communion in a series of white dresses and restrained gestures. Denis favors collective rhythm over individual anecdote; the ceremony becomes a luminous procession where faith is expressed through the repetition of forms.
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#056
Blessing of a yacht on the Belon River
A religious blessing accompanies the launching of a yacht on the Belon River. Denis brings together sacred tradition and modern leisure without contradiction; the boat can leave, the rite ensures that nautical elegance does not completely forget the sky.
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#057
The Green Christ
With The Green Christ, Denis entrusts the spiritual charge of the figure to an unnatural color. The body integrates into the landscape and decor as a living symbol; religious painting abandons academic modeling for a more immediate presence.
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#058
Five hours
In the series Intimités, Five Hours shows a couple locked in a living room set like a scene. Vallotton reduces gestures and lets the furniture speak; tea or meeting time becomes a little drama for which no one provides the program.
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#059
Sentimental conference
A man and a woman stand in a nocturnal landscape that seems to cool their proximity. Vallotton borrows his title from Verlaine and paints love in a less than talkative light; the conference is sentimental, but the conversation seems to have taken a few meters in advance.
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#060
Poker
Around a gaming table, the figures focus on the cards and keep their intentions to themselves. Vallotton transforms poker into a collective portrait of restraint; faces matter less than the discreet tension between hands, money and the next move.
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#061
The top hat, interior
A top hat almost becomes the main character of a dark interior. Vallotton uses this social accessory as a black mass that structures the scene; masculine elegance is present, even when its owner seems to have left the conversation.
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#062
Moonlight
The moon illuminates a simplified landscape where the water, sky and shore become large silent bands. Vallotton refuses the impressionist shimmer; his night is clear, constructed and slightly unreal, like a memory that has carefully arranged its details.
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#063
Portrait of Grégoire Le Roy
Lemmen portrays the symbolist poet Grégoire Le Roy with an attention that unites face, background and rhythm of touches. The meeting between literature and painting is not decorative: it belongs to the Belgian network which linked the Nabis to the avant-gardes of Brussels.
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#064
The coast at Heyst
On the Belgian coast, Lemmen organizes houses, beach and sea into divided touches and measured surfaces. Heyst becomes a field of experience between neo-impressionism and decorative sense; the landscape advances by vibrations rather than by great atmospheric effects.
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#065
The Two Sisters or The Serruys Sisters
Two sisters occupy an interior whose fabrics and lines extend their proximity. Lemmen avoids official pose and builds a relationship through parallels, looks and color; the double portrait becomes a wordless family conversation.
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#066
Blue navy, wave effect
Lacombe paints the wave as a sculpted blue mass, close to the wooden reliefs he also created. The foam, the rocks and the sea form a single powerful movement; Nabi Brittany sets sail here with an almost mythological energy.
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#067
The Beautiful Angela
Gauguin represents Marie-Angélique Satre, known as Belle Angèle, in a circle inspired by Japanese prints, with a Peruvian idol at her side. The model hated the portrait; art history proved him wrong with a remarkable lack of tact.
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#068
Red Mill
Anquetin paints the Moulin-Rouge with the contours and flat areas of partitionism. The Parisian establishment becomes a luminous sign as much as a real place; nocturnal modernity is constructed by silhouettes, posters and bold colors rather than by depth.
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#069
The sacred wood dear to the arts and the Muses
Puvis de Chavannes imagines a wood where the arts and the Muses come together in ancient peace. This monumental decoration profoundly influenced the Nabis: it showed that a modern painting could once again become a wall, rhythm and shared space.
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#070
Landscape, Brookleton
Son of Camille Pissarro and close to the Nabi environment, Lucien Pissarro paints the English landscape with a clear structure inherited from neo-impressionism. Brookleton becomes a place of passage between French and British traditions, observed with the patience of an engraver.
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#071
The dining room overlooking the garden
The Cannet dining room opens onto a garden whose light invades the table and the walls. Bonnard paints less a room than a circulation of colors; the interior and exterior politely give up their border to share lunch.
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#072
The Red Room
Vallotton encloses an intimate scene in a room dominated by red. The bed, doors and colored surfaces impose their geometry on the characters; the passion announced by color seems monitored by a decor which loses nothing of the scene.
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#073
Reading models in the workshop
In the workshop, Lemmen observes models and readers at work rather than a heroic pose. The scene reveals the daily life of creation: waiting, looking, comparing, starting again. Art is made here with a lot of concentration and relatively few bugles.
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#074
September evening
Denis transforms a September evening into a landscape of memory, made of calm silhouettes and muffled chords. The season is not only a natural subject; it becomes a mood, a passage between summer light and autumn contemplation.
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#075
The witches
Ranson brings together female figures in an undergrowth full of mystery, between symbolist ritual and decoration. The gestures and branches make up the same arabesque; its witches belong less to folklore than to a world where nature experiences secret ceremonies.
See the painting →Rippl-Rónai, Filiger, Bernard, Anquetin, Redon and related painters widen the route without leaving painting.
#076
The Kiosk, Boulevard des Batignolles
The kiosk on Boulevard des Batignolles gives Bonnard a street motif cut out by signs, passers-by and architecture. The city becomes a moving frieze; the eye circulates like a pedestrian who has forgotten his appointment to look at the colors.
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#077
Public gardens: little girls playing
This panel in the Public Gardens shows little girls absorbed in their games. Vuillard treats children, dresses and trees as elements of great decoration; the scene, however, retains the spontaneity of an afternoon which is very unaware that it has become art.
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#078
Naked woman sleeping
A naked woman sleeps in a bare interior, abandoned to the weight of body and sleep. Vallotton refuses academic idealization; the framing and clean surfaces give this vulnerability a calm, almost sculptural presence.
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#079
Two Breton women in a meadow
Two Breton women stand in a meadow, their headdresses and dresses organized into simple shapes. Bernard does not seek the luminous moment; he constructs a synthetic image of Brittany, at once observed, memorized and elevated to the rank of symbol.
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#080
Place Clichy
Bonnard stretches Place Clichy into a panorama of traffic, expectations and encounters. Cars and passers-by become a series of colorful signs; Paris reads less like a perspective than like an animated band before the invention of color cinema.
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#081
The Library
Vuillard's library is not a simple background for figures: shelves, books and motifs regulate the entire composition. Written culture becomes pictorial material; you almost have to look for readers among what their readings have built around them.
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#082
Ascent to Calvary
Christ ascends to Calvary in a procession where Denis simplifies the bodies and gives the colors spiritual value. The drama is not based on anatomical illusion; it advances by rhythm, repetition and silence, like an image intended for meditation.
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#083
Breton Wrestling
Two Breton wrestlers compete under the gaze of a united community. Sérusier transforms the popular scene into a robust frieze, made of simple gestures and firm colors; local sport becomes a collective rite as much as a fight.
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#084
Forgiveness
Bernard represents a procession of Breton forgiveness with its headdresses, banners and ordered silhouettes. Partitionism gives the ceremony the clarity of a popular image; collective faith appears as a shared movement rather than a collection of portraits.
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#085
The conversation
Two women converse in an interior where the patterns risk absorbing them at any moment. Vuillard paints the exchange by inclinations and distances more than by faces; speech remains invisible, but the room seems perfectly aware.
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#086
The Cha-U-Kao clown
Cha-U-Kao, dancer and clown from the Moulin-Rouge, poses in her yellow and black costume. Toulouse-Lautrec grants him a monumental presence, far from easy caricature; the Parisian scene appears through a professional who masters her character and her outlook.
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#087
The toilet
In La Toilette, Bonnard multiplies mirrors, reflections and surfaces to make the space almost impossible to disentangle. Marthe's body belongs as much to the light as to the room; intimacy becomes a moving architecture, reconstructed by memory.
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#088
Two seamstresses under the lamp
Two seamstresses work under a lamp which concentrates the light on the fabrics and the hands. Vuillard knows this family universe from the inside; the repetition of the gesture, the silence and the proximity give domestic work dignity without staging.
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#089
Landscape with green trees
Denis simplifies the trees into large green columns which organize the landscape like a setting. Nature is not copied leaf by leaf; it becomes rhythm, surface and place of presence, faithful to the Nabi idea of a painting which fully assumes its plan.
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#090
The Bathers
Bernard's Bathers are part of a landscape reduced to contours and colored areas. The classic theme loses its academic modeling; bodies become elements of a synthetic construction, solid and deliberately far from the instantaneous.
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#091
Woman in the street
A woman crosses the street, a modern silhouette isolated by the dark contours of Anquetin. Clothing, urban light and movement make up an image close to the poster; Paris boils down to a few quick signs, but retains all its agitation.
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#092
The birth of Venus
Redon gives birth to Venus in a sea of luminous colors, far from her ancient black spindles. The goddess appears as a vision rather than as an academic body; the ancient myth becomes a pretext for an almost cosmic flowering.
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#093
Nap
A figure rests in an interior bathed in heat, observed according to this oblique framing that Bonnard likes. The nap suspends the story and lets the colors continue their conversation alone; domestic time slows down without ever becoming immobile.
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#094
The dining room, rue des Batignolles
The dining room on rue des Batignolles brings together table, figures and decor in a deliberately confused depth. Vuillard transforms a familiar place into a lived tapestry; everyone lives in the room, but the room also seems to live in everyone.
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#095
Portrait of Yvonne Lerolle in three aspects
Yvonne Lerolle appears from the front, in profile and from behind in a single composition. Denis does not seek to simulate three realistic moments; he constructs a decorative portrait where the same person becomes rhythm, variation and successive memory.
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#096
Portrait of my sister Madeleine
Émile Bernard represents his sister Madeleine with the frontality and clear contours of synthetism. The family portrait avoids sentimental confidence; the young woman maintains a serious presence, structured by color and economy of details.
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#097
The silence
A figure places a finger on his lips in a world of muffled colors. Redon gives Silence a face, but refuses to explain what it protects; the allegory acts precisely because it leaves the secret intact.
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#098
Bathers, Pouldu beach
On Pouldu beach, Denis transforms bathers into silhouettes punctuated by the coast and the light. The memory of Antiquity meets modern leisure; bodies become a clear frieze rather than an anatomical demonstration.
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#099
Dinner, lamp effect
Around a lamp, a family dines in a darkness that isolates faces and the table. Vallotton makes light a psychological instrument; everyone is close, but silence and shadows preserve distances that the meal does not resolve.
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#100
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Painted in Tahiti as a spiritual testament, the immense canvas unfolds the ages of life from right to left. Gauguin mixes figures, idols and landscape without providing an answer to the three questions in the title; he leaves the painting with the considerable ambition of keeping them open.
See the painting →What the works reveal
One hundred paintings and several ways of living with a wall
The Nabis wanted to bring art closer to life without making one or the other more banal. Their flat areas, their settings and their intimate scenes transform a room or a garden into a mental space as constructed as a large story scene.
Color stops obeying
A green, yellow or red can carry an emotion before correctly describing the grass, the sun or a dress.
The pattern eats up depth
Wallpaper, foliage and clothing bring together figure and background until you make the look a patient game of recognition.
The intimate becomes monumental
A seam, a meal, or a silent conversation acquire the density once reserved for battles and busy gods.
Decoration thinks
Decorative panels and sets not only fill the space: they organize a complete experience of color, rhythm and memory.
Chronology of the prophets of color
Five dates to follow the Nabi adventure
In Pont-Aven, Sérusier painted, under the leadership of Gauguin, a small landscape with liberated colors which became the group's portable manifesto.
Sérusier, Denis, Bonnard, Ranson, Ibels and their friends form a brotherhood whose Hebrew name means prophets; dinners suddenly take on a very decorative gravity.
Japanese prints encourage flat areas, soft lines, cut framing and spaces without illusionistic depth.
Vuillard, Bonnard, Denis and Roussel design sets for apartments where painting, walls and furniture are finally starting to speak to each other.
The trajectories diverge, but Bonnard and Vuillard extend the intimacy while Denis, Vallotton and the others each pursue their idea of the modern surface.
The Nabis in depth
Why do the Nabis make painting so intimate?
The Nabi group is formed around young artists marked by Gauguin, Pont-Aven, synthetism, Japanese prints and symbolism. Their name comes from the Hebrew nabi, prophet, which is ambitious for painters who are often very busy through tablecloths, rooms, gardens and decorative panels. But the ambition is real: to release color, simplify shapes, assert the surface of the painting and give the decor poetic power.
Paul Sérusier plays the role of trigger with Le Talisman, a small painting born under the influence of Gauguin. The landscape becomes a construction of colors, almost a magic formula for modernity. Trees, water and light transform into flat areas. The painting seems modest in size, but it opens a huge door. It goes to show that a talisman doesn't need to make a lot of noise to move furniture from art history.
Pierre Bonnard gives the Nabis daily warmth. His scenes of the garden, the dining room or domestic moments circulate color everywhere: on the walls, clothes, tables, shadows. The subject seems simple, but the composition is skillfully organized. At Bonnard, a tablecloth can become a landscape, a window can become an event, and a dining room can lead a very active interior life.
Édouard Vuillard pushes intimacy towards an almost textile density. Its interiors envelop the characters in wallpapers, hangings, dresses and patterns. The figures sometimes seem absorbed by their own decor, as if the house was thinking in a low voice. Vuillard transforms the room into an atmosphere, and the atmosphere into a subject. Even a living room corner seems capable of keeping a family secret with admirable discretion.
Maurice Denis gives the group an essential theoretical basis: before being a hobby horse, a naked woman or an anecdote, a painting is a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. This famous phrase explains a lot of things: the Nabis do not flee reality, they reorganize it as a motif, rhythm, symbol and decor. It's painting that thinks about painting, but without forgetting to remain pleasant to look at, which always is appreciated.
Félix Vallotton, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Georges Lacombe, Aristide Maillol, Jan Verkade and Rippl-Rónai broaden the movement. Vallotton brings a sharp line and dry irony, Ranson slides towards decorative mystery, Lacombe gives the landscape a sculptural force, Roussel installs gentle mythologies, Maillol simplifies the figures. The group does not have a single voice: it rather resembles a conversation in a living room where wallpaper participates actively.
In a decoration, Nabis are particularly effective because they already think of the painting as decor. Flat areas, patterns, interiors, gardens, silhouettes and colorful harmonies lend themselves naturally to living rooms, bedrooms, offices and corridors that want warmth without losing their finesse. Bonnard illuminates, Vuillard envelops, Denis structures, Vallotton sharpens. The walls get a cultivated presence, and no one has to speak too loudly.
This Top only brings together paintings where the Nabi spirit appears clearly: synthetic color, simplification, Japanese influence, intimacy, decor and symbolism. Some come from the core of the group, others from those close to it immediate, because the Nabis are less a border than a way of looking. They remind us that a room or a garden can become a complete world, especially when color decides to hold the conversation.
Four reading keys
Look without looking for the window right away
Surface, pattern, color and framing explain why these paintings seem simple at first glance and then much less docile as soon as the eye begins to circulate.
Accept the flat
The painting affirms its flatness; depth comes from shape relationships rather than a well-swept perspective corridor.
Compare figure and background
Fabrics, walls and foliage bring the shots together until the characters appear in small differences.
Read the emotion
Shades do not necessarily copy natural light; they give memory, the sacred or the intimate their temperature.
Observe the cuts
High angles, truncated silhouettes and off-center compositions show the influence of Japan and modern life.
Verifiable Nabi Library
Continue after the hundredth painting
Musée d'Orsay, Metropolitan Museum, museums dedicated to Bonnard and Maurice Denis, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons allow you to check dates, techniques, dimensions and collections. The prophets also appreciate good records.
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