Nabis, which in Hebrew means prophet, was the name adopted in about 1889 by a group of French painters, including Maurice Denis, Paul Serusier, Bonnard and Vuillard. The use of brilliant colours arranged in satisfying abstract designs is essentially the shared characteristic of their work.
Inspired by the work of Gauguin, they abandoned their academic training and their experiments with Impressionism and painted simplified forms with patches or patterns of relatively flat colour.
They were inspired by contemporary Symbolist trends in literature and were committed to the applied arts, producing, for example, designs for stage sets, ceramics, stained glass and book illustrations, as well as easel paintings.