Dread

In May 1891 a Paris benefit evening for the poet Verlaine and the painter Gauguin closed with a new play by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. In it a family waits in a room while the mother lies ill after giving birth, listening to something none of them can see coming closer. Denis was 20, and his drawing on the play was printed that September in the magazine La Plume. This painting holds the moment the daughters understand what has entered the house. Their faces have gone a pale green, their hands are stretched too long, and the flowered wall behind them carries on brightly as though nothing were happening. Simplified figures and flat decorative colour like this were the shared language of the Nabis, the young painters Denis worked among. The canvas is small because it is a fragment. The full composition proved too large to sell, so Denis cut these girls out of it.