Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

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Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel): Paul Gauguin

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Gauguin Oil Painting - Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

Keywords: Vision, Sermon, Jacob, Wrestling, Angel

Work Overview: Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
Artist Paul Gauguin
Year 1888
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 72.2 cm × 91 cm (28.4 in × 35.8 in)
Location National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

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 National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. It depicts a scene from the Bible in which Jacob wrestles an angel. It depicts this indirectly, through a vision that the women depicted see after a sermon in church. It was painted in Pont-Aven, Brittany, France.

Gauguin started off landscape painting in the summer en plein air but following the creation of Vision After the Sermon he focused increasingly on interpreting religious subject matter in a highly personal way.

The use of color, shape, and line in Vision After the Sermon is appreciated for its bold manner of handling paint. Finding inspiration in Japanese woodblock prints from Hiroshige and Hokusai, which he owned,[1] Gauguin developed the idea of non-naturalistic landscapes. He applies large areas of flat color to the composition, and the red ground departs from conventional representation of earth, field, or grass. In portraying the watching figures Gaugin experiments with the distortion of shapes, exaggerating features, and use of strong contour lines rather than gradual shifts in tone that most painters practiced. The brown trunk, black garments, white hats and red field are painted with minimal color shading. Gauguin is showing it is possible to move away from naturalism towards a more abstracted, even symbolic, manner of painting. While formal elements of Gauguin's paintings reflect the influence of Japanese prints, his choice of subject matter and composition are uniquely his own.

Gauguin structures the painting by placing a tree trunk diagonally through its center. By sectioning the image this way, he creates a visual separation between the Breton women and their vision of an angel wrestling with Jacob. This compositional decision is developed to frame the main subjects of the painting. The curve of the trunk follows the line of the head of the center-most figure. The branches and leaves shoot out directly toward the upper right corner of the painting to form a second frame around the angel and Jacob. The overall perspective of this painting is purposely skewed [2] but effectively accomplished by his clustering of people in diminished sizes along its left edge.

“Further, it was Emile Bernard who pointed out the general influence of Japanese prints on Gauguin’s work. This seems self-evident when one compares Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon to Vincent van Gogh’s Trees, a copy after Hiroshige, with its diagonally placed tree and use of red. In citing Hokusai’s Sumo wrestlers in The Manga, however, Bernard was being more specific. He designated them as the source of Gauguin’s struggling angel and Jacob”.[3] One can see their features, in the faces, of the women that are closer to the viewer. The tale of Jacob wrestling an angel is from Genesis 32:22-31 in the Old Testament. Gauguin is making use of Brenton themes while at the same time leaning towards abstraction. The women, one of whom clasps her hands in prayer, are wearing a variety of white hats and seem to be the ones having this vision. Several colors stand out above the rest, including the reds, black, and white, and contribute to the visual energy of the scene. The color most likely to catch the viewer's attention first in this painting would be red, which in this particular painting lends power to the struggle that is occurring.

Among Gauguin's masterpieces painted in Brittany are the Vision after the Sermon (1888) and the Yellow Christ (1889). In both paintings Breton peasants, to whom Gauguin was attracted as exotic, noncultivated types, figure prominently. Gauguin's usual bright colours and simplified shapes treated as flat silhouettes are present, but these paintings also reveal his symbolist leanings. Objects and events are taken out of their normal historical contexts.

In the Vision Breton women observe an episode described in Genesis: Jacob wrestling with a stranger who turns out to be an angel. Gauguin suggests thereby that the faith of these pious women enabled them to see miraculous events of the past as vividly as if they were occurring before them.

The painting is divided into two parts by the large diagonal tree-trunk, an arrangement taken from Japanese woodcuts. The foreground is filled by group of women, dressed in traditional Breton costumes, as they return from the Mass. The background depicts the biblical scene of Jacob's battle with the angel.

After this painting Gauguin became an influential member, even the leader of the Pont-Aven School which included the painters Paul Sérusier, Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Louis Anquetin, Armand Seguin, Jacob Meyer de Haan.

This painting, which dates from 1888 and was made in Pont-Aven, Brittany, is one of Gauguin's most famous works. The Breton women, dressed in distinctive regional costume, have just listened to a sermon based on a passage from the Bible. Genesis (32:22-32) relates the story of Jacob, who, after fording the river Jabbok with his family, spent a whole night wrestling with a mysterious angel. In a letter the artist wrote to Van Gogh he said 'For me the landscape and the fight only exist in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon.'

Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon is one of the most famous images in the history of art. Puzzling and mysterious, this daring and experimental composition became a manifesto for a new approach to painting. With its surprising colour, its bold outlines and deliberately flattened shapes, Gauguin set a new benchmark for the artist’s freedom to distort and exaggerate for expressive purposes, declaring his interest in an art based on the world of ideas and the imagination rather than observed reality.

Gauguin was a late starter as an artist. Prior to painting Vision of the Sermon, his nomadic life had already included a childhood in Peru, a spell as a merchant sailor and a phase as a respectable stockbroker in Paris. He was a collector and amateur painter when, after the stock market crash of 1882, he decided to take up painting full-time, eventually more or less abandoning his wife and family and embarking on the peripatetic lifestyle that would ultimately take him across the world to the South Seas and the island of Tahiti.

Vision of the Sermon was painted at Pont-Aven in Brittany in the summer of 1888. Gauguin was looking to move beyond the Impressionism of his early work, and his stays in Brittany in 1886 and 1888 were important stages in the formation of a new, simpler style. He was working closely with his young friend Émile Bernard and was in touch by letter with Vincent van Gogh in Arles. The ideas and ambitions that they shared encouraged Gauguin to experiment and in late September he wrote to Van Gogh to tell him that he had just painted ‘a religious picture, badly executed but it interested me to do it and I like it’. In this painting Gauguin attempted to combine the real and the imagined. The Breton women in traditional costume in the foreground have just heard a sermon, presumably delivered by the tonsured priest that we glimpse at the lower right. In the upper half of the composition Gauguin evokes the vision that the women now share after listening to the sermon which described the biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32: 24–32). To emphasise the contrast between the real women and the spiritual experience they imagine, Gauguin divided the composition with the diagonal trunk of an apple tree and set their dream of the wrestling figures against a striking, flat red background. Gauguin was pleased with the result and in the same letter to Van Gogh he wrote: ‘I think I have achieved a great rustic and superstitious simplicity in the figures. The whole is very severe.’

Gauguin’s deliberate distortions of form and colour were a rejection not just of conventional painting but also of more modern naturalistic styles such as Impressionism. Vision of the Sermon was shown at various exhibitions from 1889 onwards and it helped to establish his reputation as an innovator, becoming an important example for younger artists seeking new directions in art. Even today it remains a challenging picture, and Gauguin himself was not surprised when, shortly after its completion, he twice tried to donate it to local churches but his offers were firmly rejected.

The passage about Jacob wrestling with the angel is often interpreted as the hard struggle some have with faith. Jacob had to wrestle the angel all night long. It wasn't until sunrise that the angel gave up and blessed Jacob.

Gauguin here shows the struggle against a feverish red background. In the foreground he put a group of Breton women, who according to the title had just attended a sermon.

In 1888 Gauguin spent much time in the coastal village of Port-Aven in Brittany, together with many other artists. Together with the painter Émile Bernard he developed a style called cloisonism. The name refers to the compartments (cloisons) separated by metal wires used in the creation of enamel objects. The painters used thin dark lines to draw contours around more or less monochrome fields.

This work is often considered as Gauguin's definite departure from the naturalism that dominated impressionism. He used strong colours, almost without gradients, contrary to what had been the tradition since the Renaissance. He also ignored the rules of perspective. The figures on the foreground are too large in relation to Jacob and the Angel. They also almost block the view on the wrestlers, who according to tradition should have been the central elements in the composition. No wonder that the church of Pont-Aven rejected the work when Gauguin offered it...

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