Ker-Xavier Roussel

In the 1890s a group of young Paris painters called themselves the Nabis, from a Hebrew word for prophets, and set out to make art that was flat, decorative, and full of pattern. Most of them, like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, painted the quiet indoor world of Parisian apartments. Ker-Xavier Roussel went somewhere else entirely.

Roussel filled his canvases and wall panels with nymphs, fauns, and satyrs wandering through wooded landscapes, scenes lifted from the classical mythology he had loved since school. He tied himself to that circle by more than friendship. He married Vuillard's sister Marie, which made his closest painter-friend also his brother-in-law, and the two remained near-inseparable for the rest of their lives.

As he grew older he leaned further into large decorative commissions, covering the walls of public buildings and private houses with his Arcadian processions of gods and dancers, among them a set of panels for a country estate near Versailles owned by the art dealer Jos Hessel. He kept painting these mythological reveries until his death in 1944, having outlived Vuillard by four years.