Paul Gauguin, a French painter living in Tahiti, develops Synthetism, a term used by post-Impressionist artists like Gauguin, Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin, to distinguish their work from Impressionism.

Earlier, Synthetism has been connected to the term Cloisonnism, and later to Symbolism.

Synthetist artists aimed to synthesize three features:
• The outward appearance of natural forms.
• The artist’s feelings about their subject.
• The purity of the aesthetic considerations of line, color and form.

In 1890, Maurice Denis summarizes the goals for synthetism as,
    "It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."

The term had been first used in 1877 to distinguish between scientific and naturalistic impressionism, and in 1889 when Gauguin and Emile Schuffenecker organized an Exposition de peintures du groupe impressioniste et synthétiste in the Café Volpini at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

The confusing title has been mistakenly associated with impressionism.

Synthetism emphasizes two-dimensional flat patterns, thus differing from impressionist art and theory.

Sérusier, who is around twenty-five in 1888, had been a student of philosophy before he decided to become an artist and attend the Académie Julian in his native Paris.

Eighteen-year-old Maurice Denis studies also at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Reacting against the naturalistic tendencies of Impressionism, Denis falls under the influence of the work of Paul Gauguin, whose style is also much admired by Sérusier.

Both become members of the so-called Pont-Aven school that forms in the summer around Gauguin.

Upon the return of the Pont-Aven school to Paris in the fall of 1888, the members meet regularly to discuss new developments in French art, particularly Symbolism.

The Symbolists are now the avant-garde, and one of quite a new kind, influencing not only the arts but also the thought and spirit of the era.

Pierre Bonnard, after taking his baccalaureate, in which he distinguished himself in classics, had studied law at the insistence of his father, and for a short time in 1888 he worked in a government office.

In the meantime he attended the École des Beaux-Arts, but, failing to win the Prix de Rome (a prize to study at the French Academy in Rome), he transferred to the Académie Julian.

After a year's military service, the twenty-three-year-old Bonnard shares a studio in Montmartre with Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard in 1890.

Maurice Denis joins in the Symbolist movement together with friends and fellow students Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Ker Xavier Roussel, and Félix Vallotton.

As the Symbolist painters' theoretician, Denis enunciates in 1890 the underlying principle of much modern painting in the following (often-quoted) words: "Remember that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."

Paul Cézanne divides his time between Aix and Paris.

References to his work begin to appear in the Paris press.

A group of young painters, greatly influenced by the Synthetist works of Paul Gauguin's Pont-Aven period and inspired by French Symbolist painting, Japanese woodcuts, and English Pre-Raphaelite art, revolt against the faithfulness to nature of Impressionism.

In addition, largely because they are in close touch with Symbolist writers, they regard choice of subject as important.

The painters, mostly alumni of the Académie Julian, call themselves Nabis (from Hebrew navi, "prophet," or "seer").

Among them are Maurice Denis (with Paul Sérusier the group's main theoretician), Paul Ranson (who gives the group's style a decorative and linear inflection), Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Henri-Gabriel Ibels, and René Piot.

The quasi-mystical attitude of the Nabis is perfectly suited to Denis's highly religious nature.

The Nabis in 1891 hold their first exhibition, attempting in their works to illustrate Denis's Symbolist dictum.

They soon begin to apply this idea to such varied works as posters, stained glass, theater sets, and book illustrations.

The Symbolist movement in French painting is linked with literature and, in particular, with drama; it inspires its own periodical, La Revue Blanche, and Le Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, both founded in Paris in 1891.

Beginning in this year, there are exhibitions held twice yearly at a Paris gallery, Le Barc de Boutteville.

Following studies at the Paris Conservatoire, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, an aspiring twenty-two-year-old actor, joins Bonnard, Denis, and Vuillard in their shared Montmartre studio.

He acts first at André Antoine's Théâtre-Libre and then at Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, where he is introduced to Symbolist theater.

Twenty-one-year-old Albert André, who had entered the Académie Julian in 1890 and met fellow students Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard and Louis Valtat, participates in the Salon des Indépendants where his five canvases win the admiration of Renoir and are bought by Durand-Ruel.

Maurice Denis has begun to place emphasis on subject matter, traditional perspective, and modeling, as in Homage à Cézanne (1901), a picture of artists admiring one of Cézanne's still lifes.

Now in his thirtieth year, Denis had been one of the leading artists and theoreticians of the Symbolist movement, but after visiting Italy, had became greatly influenced by the works of the great Italian fresco painters of the fourteenth and fifteeneth centuries.