Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
Paul Gauguin (1848 to 1903) · 1888
A group of Breton women in white coifs and black dresses have just left church and, with their eyes closed and hands clasped, they see the sermon they have heard: Jacob wrestling with the angel. The two figures grapple on a ground of pure vermilion red, separated from the women by the diagonal trunk of an apple tree. A cow stands at the far left, small and bewildered. Nothing about the scale, the colour or the space makes literal sense, and that is the whole idea. Gauguin is painting not what the women see but what they believe.
The picture was made in Pont-Aven in Brittany in the late summer of 1888 and it is usually taken as the first fully Symbolist painting. Look at the flat areas of colour with dark outlines, borrowed from Japanese prints and from the enamel technique of cloisonne, and at the way the priest's profile at the far right, said to be Gauguin himself, is cut off by the frame. The women's headdresses are painted as simplified white shapes, almost like paper cut-outs. The red field, not a real meadow, stands for the fervour of their inner vision.
Gauguin offered the painting to the church at Nizon and then to the church at Pont-Aven, and both priests refused it, thinking it a joke. It passed through several collectors before the National Gallery of Scotland bought it in 1925, an extraordinarily bold purchase for a British museum at the time. It has been central to the story of modern art ever since, the point at which painting stopped recording appearances and began inventing its own realities, and it is arguably the most important modern picture in Scotland.
Did You Know? Gauguin tried to give the painting to a village church as a gift, and the priest turned it down, suspecting a practical joke.
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