Maurice Denis was a French painter known for his involvement in the Nabis group. His richly colored paintings employed contrasting warm and cool colors to depict landscapes, portraits, and mythic or religious scenes, such as Easter Mystery (1891). “Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote of some sort, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” he once wrote. Born on November 25, 1870 in Granville, France, he went on to study at both the École des Beaux-Arts and later the Académie Julian, where he met Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard. During these early years in Paris, he and his classmates became interested in the Symbolist works of Paul Gauguin. Denis visited the artists’ colony in Pont-Aven on the Brittany coast, here under Gauguin’s eye, his paintings took on the mystical quality which exemplifies his mature work. After around 1900, Denis’s interest in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance featured prominently in his work, as evinced by his use of perspectival space and modeled forms. He died on November 13, 1943 in Paris, France. Today, Denis’ works can be found in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.