Author
Post-Impressionism
Vision After the Sermon
Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is an oil painting by French artist Paul Gauguin, completed in 1888. It is now in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. It depicts a scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an angel.
Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)
Its significance comes from how image, rhythm, and material hold together personal color systems, form as construction, and subjective intensity.
Highlights
Surprising facts & legends
Short but striking stories around the work — the things that make it come alive.
Interesting facts
The story around the work
Interesting facts & legends
- Gauguin painted this in Pont-Aven, Brittany in 1888 — the same summer Van Gogh was begging him to come to Arles — and finished it in about two weeks.
- He tried to donate the painting to two local churches in Brittany, both of which refused it; the priests thought the violent red field and wrestling figures were too disturbing for their congregations.
- The canvas is relatively small — just 73 by 92 centimeters — which surprises almost everyone who sees it for the first time after knowing it only from reproductions.
- That flat, unmodulated red ground had no precedent in Western painting; Gauguin lifted the idea from Japanese woodblock prints, particularly those of Hiroshige and Hokusai, deliberately erasing any illusion of three-dimensional space.
- The Scottish National Gallery acquired the painting in 1925 for £1,200 — roughly equivalent to about £80,000 today — at a time when Gauguin's market was still far from certain.
- Scholars have noted that the Breton women in white coifs occupy more than half the canvas, while Jacob and the angel are pushed into the upper right corner, almost as an afterthought — Gauguin's way of insisting that the vision belongs to the women, not to the viewer.
More details Open the extended reading, official sources, and visual context around the work
Historical context
Vision After the Sermon inside its era
Vision After the Sermon is now associated with National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and helps viewers read post-impressionism as a living history of images rather than a list of dates.
Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is an oil painting by French artist Paul Gauguin, completed in 1888. It is now in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. It depicts a scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an angel. The location in National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh matters too, because it frames the work not as an isolated icon but as part of a living institutional history.
Path to recognition
How the work became widely known
The work is famous because it joins a clear silhouette, a strong image, and a durable cultural memory that even first-time viewers can enter.
Value
Why the work matters now
Its significance comes from how image, rhythm, and material hold together personal color systems, form as construction, and subjective intensity.
Connections and legacy
How to read the work more broadly
Vision After the Sermon was a founding work of Synthetism and Symbolism — its flat planes of pure color pointing beyond Impressionism.
Official sources
Where to verify the institutional context
- Official institution site National Galleries of Scotland
Visual context
Related images and nearby entry points
What to look at
Three entry points into the work
Even a very famous artwork opens more fully when the viewer knows where to look for tension, meaning, and compositional focus.
- Notice how the composition distributes emphasis across the whole surface.
- See how light, color, and brush rhythm shape the emotional tone.
- Read the work not only as an isolated image, but as part of the history of post-impressionism.
More by the artist
More works: Paul Gauguin
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Continue the exhibition
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This makes it easier to move through art not as a list of names, but as a connected system of images, themes, and historical gestures.
