Étude pour Le quatuor, décor de l'Éternel Été

Maurice Denis's study for the quartet from the decoration Éternel Été — Eternal Summer — belongs to his sustained engagement with the Nabis ideal of painting as flat, decorative surface rather than illusionistic window. Denis was the theorist of the Nabis movement — the group including Bonnard, Vuillard, and Sérusier who drew on Gauguin's lessons about colour and flatness — and his decorative projects expressed these ideas in large-scale applied form. The study for a musical quartet amid a summer setting engages with the classical ideal of harmonious figures in nature that Denis sought to revitalise through Symbolist colour theory.

Denis's study employs the flattened colour areas and simplified form that characterise his Nabis method, with the figures of the quartet integrated into a decorative surface rather than naturalistically modelled in space. The colour relationships are deliberately harmonic, expressing the musical subject through visual means.