The exhibition focuses on Denis’s long-held ambition to illustrate The Imitation of Christ, the 15th-century devotional text attributed to Thomas à Kempis. Denis first encountered the book as a teenager and spent roughly a decade developing the project before avant-garde dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard finally issued it in 1903. Almost seventy wood engravers participated in translating Denis’s designs into print.

What makes this presentation particularly valuable is the access it gives to artistic process. Pencil studies, ink, wash and tracing paper show Denis repeatedly adjusting composition and meaning before arriving at the final image. These works appear alongside paintings and other Christian subjects, placing the book project within his wider attempt to connect modern art with spiritual experience.

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was a French painter, theorist and founding member of Les Nabis, the group that helped push late-19th-century painting away from naturalistic representation and toward flattened colour, pattern and decorative structure. His work combined modern formal experimentation with an unusually persistent Catholic faith, making religious imagery central to much of his career.

Not a destination exhibition on its own, but a very good slow-looking discovery inside the Musée d’Orsay.

It is especially valuable for understanding a side of Denis that can get lost behind the decorative beauty of the Nabis: his seriousness about spirituality, books and the relationship between art and belief.