Portrait de Maurice Denis

Portrait de Maurice Denis of 1930 gives permanent form to the relationship between two of the Nabi movement's founding figures — Vuillard and Denis, who had been at the movement's center since its formation in 1889 and who remained connected through decades of shared artistic history. Denis had been the movement's primary theorist, articulating the Nabi doctrine in his famous 1890 essay and continuing to write about art with systematic intelligence throughout his career. By 1930 he was also the foremost painter of religious subjects among the former Nabis, having devoted much of his mature career to the decoration of churches and the development of a modern religious art. Vuillard's portrait approached this figure — whose theoretical writing had been foundational to his own early development — with the characteristic intimism of his late style: Denis encountered within a specific domestic environment, his presence rendered with the attentive directness of a portrait that combined personal knowledge with professional observation.

Denis's intellectual character is suggested through the quality of Vuillard's observation — a face of evident seriousness rendered with the same formal intelligence as Denis himself theorized. The surrounding environment receives Vuillard's characteristic attention, the portrait being as much about a specific interior moment as about the sitter's individual character.