In 1888 Paul Serusier, an art student at the Academie Julian, met Paul Gauguin in Brittany. When Serusier returned to Paris he told his fellow students about Gauguin's ideas and gathered a group of artists who later called themselves Nabis . The artists included Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Vuillard.  

The term Nabis was from a Hebrew word meaning prophets and referred to their half serious pose as religious illuminators. The group was sometimes called Synthetist or Symbolist and is often now labled as Avant-Garde post Impressionism.

Members of Nabis: Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri-Gabriel Ibels,, Paul-Élie Ranson, Kerr-Xavier Roussel, Édouard Vuillard, Aristide Maillol, George Lacombe, Jozef Rippl-Ronai, Jan Verkade, Felix Vallotton.

Inspired by Gauguins use of color and rythmic pattern, the young artists celebrated design. According to Gauguin, paintings were meant to be plane surfaces covered with colors arranged in a certain order. "Everything is contained in the beauty of the work itself." explained Denis.

Denis, who was only 20 at the time became the groups main theorist and wrote several articles for art magazines.

Artists of the Nabis were bored by Impressionism but held a deep admiration for Gauguin. Patterns become a new pictorial language. Villeurs and Bonnard expressed patterns in colorful interiors where a table or a figure is often expressed in its two dimensional pattern.

Explorations of pattern flow into other creative directions. Design should not be just for paintings. Nabis members designed for posters, illustration, tapestry, sculpture or glasswork and blurred the distinctions of artist and designer-craftsman. Interior decoration was one of their principal activities.

The first exhibition was held in 1892 but the young artists drifted apart after 1899. Their community of aesthetic ambitions was not long lasting, but became part of the modern tradition as art headed into a new century.