Date: 03-07-2005
Owning Institution: The National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 19th Century        

Next Wednesday a new exhibition will open at the Royal Scottish Academy, focussing on the origins, meaning and influence of just one, much debated work of art – The Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, which was painted by Paul Gauguin in the late summer of 1888. It is my picture of the week.

Gauguin described the work, shortly after painting it, in a letter to his friend Vincent Van Gogh, with whom he was about to stay (an ill-starred sojourn on which I touched, coincidentally, in last week’s column): “A group of Breton women praying in costumes of very intense black. Yellowy white bonnets, very luminous. The two bonnets to the right are like monstrous helmets. An apple tree crosses the dark violet canvas and the foliage drawn in masses like clouds of emerald green shows, in its interstices, the yellowy green of sunshine. The ground is pure vermilion. Close to the church it is toned down and becomes brownish red. The angel is dressed in violent ultramarine blue and Jacob in bottle green. The wings of the angel are pure chrome yellow number 1. The hair of the angel chrome number 2 and the feet flesh orange – I believe that I have achieved, in the figures, a great rustic and superstitious simplicity – the whole thing is very severe – the cow under the tree is tiny compared to reality and is rearing up. For me, in this painting, the landscape and the combat only exist in the imagination of the people in prayer after the sermon, which is why there is a contrast between the people, who are natural, and the struggle going on in a landscape which is non-natural and out of proportion.”

Gauguin painted the picture while staying in the village of Pont-Aven, on the southwestern coast of Brittany, in the Departement of Finistere. Like many other artists of his post-Impressionist generation, he wanted to get away from what he saw as the materialism, the pollution, the rampant capitalism, the class-consciousness and the bureacracy of city life. The Impressionists, following the poet Charles Baudelaire’s clarion call for “an art of modern life”, had embraced the modern city as a subject for painting, depicting urban smogs, café-concerts, all the life of the Parisian boulevard. But Gauguin was all for purity and simplicity. “I love Brittany,” the painter famously proclaimed. “I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes resound on this soil of granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone that I try to achieve in my painting.”

The Vision after the Sermon expresses Gauguin’s idealised view of Breton peasant religiosity. The source of the image appears to have been the Festival of Pardons, an annual religious rite with links to the pre-Christian, pagan past. This involved the blessing of fields and farm animals in the name of fertility, as well as the parading of a symbolic cow, signifying sacrifice and redemption. The accompanying church service traditionally included a sermon on the biblical theme of Jacob wrestling with the angel, which was followed by wrestling matches on the village green. The Festival of Pardons was observed with particularly fierce piety during the 1880s, when there was a widespread revival of popular Catholicism throughout France. In the autumn of 1888, a shepherd boy in the Forez mountains reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in a vision. Numerous other such visions were reported during the 1870s and 1880s, a period which also produced the pilgrimage movement that resulted in the annual Festival of Lourdes. It came to be known as “l’epoque des apparitions”, the epoch of apparitions.

Gauguin, who said that he dreamed of creating an art that might seem “totally Japanese but seen through the eyes of a Peruvian savage”, devised an appropriately primitivist style to express his notion of primitive Breton Christianity. The closed eyes and reverent expressions of his peasant women, reduced in several cases to the totemic shapes of their traditional headgear, indicate that theirs is an inward, spiritual, supernatural vision. The picture is full of intentional archaisms, such as its distorted scale relationships, its flattened, distinctly non-perspectival presentation of space, derived in part from the Japanese print tradition and its simple, generalised forms, outlined in black like the leading of stained glass windows. The Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who saw the painting on public exhibition in Paris in 1889, was disgusted by it. He reproached Gauguin, he said, not for the nature of his style, stolen from Japanese and Byzantine art, but “for not having applied his synthesis to our modern philosophy, which is absolutely social, anti-authoritarian and anti-mystical. This is a backward step.” It seems mildly ironic, given that The Vision after the Sermon turns its back so aggressively on the modern world, that the bold and forceful colours which Gauguin used to create it – especially the vivid chrome yellows and violent reds – were new pigments only made possible by nineteenth-century developments in metallurgy. Gauguin’s primitivist vision was fashioned from materials produced by state of the art technology.

The figures of Jacob wrestling with the angel illustrate one of the more enigmatic of biblical texts, Genesis 32, Verses 23 to 31. Having crossed the torrent of Jabbock with his family, Jacob spends the night wrestling with a mysterious angel – a combat that has been variously interpreted as man’s struggle with God, with the devil, or with himself. For Gauguin, it may have had a personal significance besides. He mythologised his own life as a struggle, never more so than at the moment when he painted this picture. In October 1888, he wrote to his friend Ary Schuffenecker: “This Symbolist path that I have chosen to follow is full of dangers, and I have hardly taken my first step along it. But it is in the depths of me and one must always follow one’s own nature. I know only too well that I shall be less and less understood.”