Post-Impressionism

Vision After the Sermon

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.

Paul Gauguin · 1888

Read history Open artist

Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

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.

Highlights

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.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details How Gauguin separated Breton worshippers from Jacob's imagined struggle with a red field and tree trunk, making a manifesto for art beyond visible fact.

Brittany beyond Impressionism

In 1888 Gauguin sought painting independent of fleeting observation

Working near Émile Bernard and corresponding with Van Gogh, he combined memory, faith and decoration. He called the result a religious picture, “badly executed” yet compelling to him.

The remark records deliberate risk before the new language was accepted.

Gauguin imagined Brittany as archaic simplicity, but this was a visiting Parisian's construction, not neutral ethnography. He heightened differences of dress and faith and turned the region into a laboratory of the 'primitive'. Both truths matter: close observation of worshippers and appropriation of their lives for his programme of artistic renewal.

Two spaces

Women are real; the struggle exists in their imagination

Gauguin told Van Gogh that landscape and fight existed only in the worshippers' minds after the sermon. White caps occupy the foreground; Jacob and the angel appear beyond the diagonal tree.

The trunk divides bodily presence from shared thought.

In his letter to Van Gogh he included a sketch and stressed that the wrestling figures were disproportionate and existed in imagination. It is rare authorial guidance to a painting's mechanism, yet it does not close meaning: we cannot know whether the women share one image or whether the red field joins separate inner visions.

Impossible red ground

Colour supplies spiritual pressure rather than weather

Flat vermilion, black outlines and high viewpoint reject a realistic Breton field. Japanese prints and stained glass offered alternatives to academic depth.

The unreal colour announces vision before narrative.

The apple-tree trunk cuts the canvas like the edge of scenery. Gauguin admired Japanese prints where a branch interrupts Western perspective. Here the device becomes theological: material tree divides service from vision, while branches cross both and hold them on one surface.

Jacob made small

The viewers of the miracle outweigh its heroes

Jacob and angel resemble distant wrestlers while enormous caps block the foreground. Religious action yields to the community imagining it.

Belief itself becomes the subject.

Scale places us inside the congregation. We stand almost behind the women, whose coifs obstruct the event. Jacob and the angel do not display anatomical credibility; they are a sign of struggle retained after the sermon. Religious imagery comes not from above but from collective attention.

A Symbolist programme

Form now obeys idea

The painting became a benchmark for the freedom to distort and helped define Symbolist art. Yet costumes, hands and bowed heads retain observed specificity.

Its power lies where factual gesture opens into an invented world.

Gauguin offered the painting to a local church, but the priest refused it. Instead of lucid instruction, parishioners received red ground, cropped bodies, and an uncertain border of reality. The work entered modernism rather than a sanctuary. Its later canonical status grew from what its first religious audience found unsuitable.

Official sources