In her Wall Street Journal article, “A Mythic Moment in Modern Painting,” Mary Tompkins Lewis writes:

When Sérusier presented the panel at the Académie Julian in Paris, his peers were stunned and immediately pronounced it “Le Talisman,” as it precipitated the approach they would adopt thereafter in their work. These young artists, including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, would become known, along with Denis and Sérusier, as the “Nabis” (from the Hebrew term for “prophets”) and truly saw themselves as heralds of a fundamentally new kind of art. They formed a secret fraternity organized around esoteric rituals and proclamations, and initiated a collective artistic movement across a variety of media that was marked by its powerful aesthetic unity. The tiny panel, which hung on a wall of the Paris meeting place they christened “The Temple,” was never exhibited, but preserved as an artifact of their origins.