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Dr Francesca Berry, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies published her monograph Édouard Vuillard, the Nabis, and the Politics of Domesticity in the UK this January, with a US and Australian release forthcoming 3 April 2025.

The book is the first to explore the feminine and feminist politics of Intimiste art. A term created by contemporary critics, Intimisme describes a modernist approach to art attributed to Édouard Vuillard and other artists that constituted the Nabi ‘brotherhood’ of the 1890s. Intimiste paintings and prints share common properties including domestic and feminine motifs and intimate settings. In hundreds of paintings and prints of figures in domestic rooms, Vuillard and the Nabis brought the domesticity of the women with whom they lived into prominence within the Parisian avant-garde.

Through extensive primary source research, Dr Berry's book reveals Intimisme’s social and political meanings. She argues that, among the Nabis, Édouard Vuillard particularly made visible the uncommon aspects of feminine experience including sexual initiation, stillbirth, illicit labour, and the unrelenting housework that can define the domestic lives of women. She also argues that Vuillard's work will have been shaped by the women he lived and worked with.

Speaking about the launch of her book, Dr Berry said: “I am immensely proud to have published this book, in which I introduce the problem of gender difference to the art of the Nabis. I do so not to undermine their art-historical significance but to deepen it. Feminist interpretation allows the femininities in Vuillard’s art to be seen. I hope my monograph provides an important development in the incomplete project of overcoming the structural repression of domesticity, femininity and women’s creative agency in histories of male artists’ modernist practice.”

is available to purchase from Bloomsbury Academic, in its Material Culture of Art and Design series.