Breakfast

Maurice Denis painted 'Breakfast' in 1901 during a period when he was theorising the relationship between domestic life and spiritual experience—a central concern of the Nabi movement he had helped found. The breakfast table, with its communion-like gathering of family members around shared food and drink, was for Denis a subject dense with sacramental overtones. He was simultaneously writing influential theoretical essays on painting and living the Catholic domestic life he believed art should reflect and sanctify. The Städel Museum holds this intimate domestic scene from his mature Nabi period.

Denis's flat, simplified colour areas and the Nabi concern for the painting's surface as an 'arrangement of colours on a flat surface' are deployed within a domestic interior. The figures around the breakfast table are rendered with the simplified stylisation characteristic of his most theoretically committed works.