Vision After the Sermon

Vision After the Sermon, also known as Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, was painted by Paul Gauguin in 1888, during a second stay in Pont-Aven, in Brittany. In the foreground, a group of Breton women in their white coiffes walk back from church and stand transfixed by something happening behind them: the struggle between Jacob and the angel from the Old Testament. The picture leaves open whether the women actually witness this encounter or imagine it, perhaps as a psychological echo of the sermon they have just heard, so the meaning is left for the viewer to settle.

The painting is regarded as one of the earliest examples of Symbolism in Gauguin's work and sums up much of his approach. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, which he knew through reproductions, he turns the biblical wrestlers into Breton figures, and their combat resembles a traditional regional form of wrestling. A diagonal apple tree separates the group of women, linked to everyday reality, from the space where the imagined scene unfolds.

Gauguin sets aside linear perspective and uses flat, pure colours without blending, which reinforce the sense of a flat surface. Heavy dark outlines enclose areas of vivid colour, a technique known as cloisonnism, inspired by stained glass and leaded windows. The approach is closely tied to Synthetism, the style Gauguin came to lead in these years.

The work was made for a local church, but the parish priest rejected it. Gauguin nevertheless took pride in it, especially in the figures, which he described as very rustic and superstitious. It is now held by the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and it stands as an early example of how the artist sought to render popular religious feeling in a personal, synthetic visual language.

Painter

Paul Gauguin

Date

1888

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

72 × 91 cm

Museum

National Galleries Scotland, City of Edinburgh

Movement

Pont-Aven School

Genre

religious art

Depicts

pardon, folk costume of Brittany

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