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Intimism (French: intimisme) was an artistic movement in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, a style of intimate genre painting
Paintings that depict scenes of ordinary people going about their everyday lives. using impressionist techniques. It was most notably practised by the French painters Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard after the 1899 disbandment of Les Nabis,[1][2] a group of young French artists influential in the transition from impressionism and academic art to abstract art, symbolism and other early modernist movements.[3]
The intimists differed from the impressionists by abandoning perspective in favour of emphasising surface texture, thus merging figure and ground. Their subjects tended to be their friends and family in “tight” domestic situations.[1][2]
The French art critic Camille Mauclair defined intimism as:[4]
The term “intimism” has since been extended to artistic endeavours outside of the historical period. Intimist film, for example, refers to cinema that portrays domestic narratives, or focuses on the mundane.[5]
