1 - The Shepherdess’s Reply to the Shepherd, with a four-color lithographed frontispiece by Maurice Denis.

The Shepherdess’s Reply to the Shepherd, with a four-color lithographed frontispiece by Maurice Denis. Paris, Publications de la Revue Blanche, 1892. Small in-4 Bradel-bound volume decorated with wading birds and streams, with a vertical title label. Some scuffing on the spine. Waterstains. A print run of 55 copies, numbered, signed, and stamped by the author—here with the inscription “AUTOGRAPHED FOR MAURICE DENIS”—and printed on French handmade paper (No. 8). Separate first edition, following the pre-first publication of the text in the August–September 1892 issue of *La Revue blanche*. A rare publication from the early days of *La Revue blanche*, one of the main hubs of the young literary and artistic avant-garde. Édouard Dujardin, a leading figure in Symbolism, was part of this movement of writers and artists who sought to jointly renew the forms of the book and the image. The frontispiece, a four-color lithograph, represents above all a very early contribution by Maurice Denis—then aged 21—to book illustration. This rare edition, printed in a limited run, thus attests—as early as 1892—to the convergence of Dujardin’s literary Symbolism and Maurice Denis’s Nabi aesthetic, and predates the major collaborations between *La Revue blanche* and Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vallotton. Provenance: Maurice Denis Collection Private collection MAURICE DENIS: THE WORK AND THE LIFE, FROM THE INTIMATE TO THE MONUMENTAL There are collections that are more than just a gathering of works; through their very coherence, they paint a portrait of an artist and a world. Comprising more than 240 works, the collection now offered by the descendants of Maurice Denis provides this rare opportunity: to explore, as closely as possible to the time of its creation, a body of work that accompanied the major transformations in French art from the late 19th century to World War II. Maurice Denis belonged to a generation for whom painting no longer meant merely reproducing the appearances of the world. Trained in Paris in the 1880s, he was one of the founding figures of the Nabis group, alongside Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Paul Ranson. More than a school in the strict sense, the group served as an aesthetic and intellectual laboratory. Inspired by Gauguin and the Pont-Aven experience, the young artists asserted the primacy of surface, color, and composition over naturalistic illusion. Denis was, from very early on, one of the group’s most attentive and eloquent theorists. His famous definition of the painting as a flat surface organized by colors remains one of the foundational texts of modern painting. But this statement, often taken out of context, cannot reduce his work to a mere formal exercise. For Denis, the simplification of forms and the autonomy of color are also the tools of a painting that explores memory, spirituality, and inner life. The visible world becomes less a model to be reproduced than a reality to be interpreted. This ambition explains the remarkable breadth of his work. As a painter, decorator, illustrator, printmaker, and theorist, Denis did not view the boundaries between the arts as rigid barriers. Alongside the Nabis, he embraced a broader conception of creativity, one that extended to painting as well as books, interior design, and architectural space. Large-scale decorative projects thus came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in his career, culminating in the monumental commissions of his mature years. This quest for a synthesis of the arts is matched by another, more personal constant: the presence of his family. Marthe, his wife, followed by his children and loved ones, form one of the most enduring themes in his work. Far from being mere biographical records, these familiar figures become the focus of an ongoing pictorial exploration. Daily life, children’s bedrooms, walks, and vacations provided Denis with a repertoire of forms and situations where intimacy merged with a more universal ambition. This same tension between the everyday and the spiritual naturally led the artist toward sacred art. His faith is not a separate realm from his work as a painter: it informs his reflections on decoration, landscape, and the human figure. After World War I, the founding—along with George Desvallières—of the Ateliers d’art sacré placed this exploration within a collective project to revitalize religious art. Denis’s work thus unfolds with remarkable continuity, from the Nabis experiments of his youth to the grand decorative works of his maturity, without ever relinquishing the freedom of color or the necessity of painting conceived as a language. THE SCOPE OF A COLLECTION The selection brings together