Tahitian Women on the Beach
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), Paul Gauguin, 1888. Oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)
Paul Gauguin · 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 72.2 × 91 cm
- Held by
- National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin was a successful Paris stockbroker who collected Impressionist paintings before he made any, and who gave up the career at thirty-five to paint full-time — leaving a wife and five children in Copenhagen in the process. The work that matters begins in Brittany, where from 1886 he developed with Émile Bernard a way of painting in flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy contours, borrowed in part from cloisonné enamel and Japanese prints. He spent nine weeks living with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, which ended badly and permanently.
Nearby
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Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
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The Potato Eaters
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Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
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What to look at
The painting is split by a tree trunk into two incompatible kinds of reality, and that split is the entire idea. On the left, Breton women in starched white coifs, heads bowed, painted as observed fact. On the right, Jacob wrestling the angel from Genesis — not happening in the field but happening in their heads, immediately after the sermon they have just heard. Gauguin signals the difference by making the ground between them pure vermilion. Not a red field: a field that could not be red, a colour that announces this is a mental image. He had been working in Pont-Aven with Émile Bernard, and the technique here — flat areas of unmodulated colour bounded by heavy dark contours — comes out of that summer and out of looking at cloisonné enamel and at Japanese prints. The wrestling pair is lifted almost directly from a Hokusai figure study.