Collection: Les Nabis

Les Nabis, from the Hebrew term meaning prophets, was the Post-Impressionist group that formed at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1888 around Paul Sérusier (1864–1927). The name was coined by the poet Henri Cazalis in 1888, casting the painters as prophets of a renewed modern art. The founding moment was Sérusier's small painting on a cigar-box panel, The Talisman, made in October 1888 at Pont-Aven under the direct guidance of Paul Gauguin, who instructed him to translate sensation into pure flat colour rather than naturalistic description. Sérusier carried the panel back to his fellow students at the Académie Julian, who became the founding circle.

The principal members were Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), Maurice Denis (1870–1943), Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Ker-Xavier Roussel, Paul Ranson, the Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai, the Dutch Jan Verkade, and the sculptor Aristide Maillol. Maurice Denis served as theorist; his 1890 essay Définition du néo-traditionnisme, published in Art et Critique, opened with the famous declaration that a picture, before being a subject, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. The group developed an intimate decorative idiom marked by flat colour planes, japoniste compositional asymmetry, and domestic interior subjects, particularly in Vuillard's intimisme and Bonnard's late nudes. The journal La Revue Blanche served as the movement's literary platform. The final group exhibition took place in 1900.